As a reminder, the electromagnetic (EM) shielding of a material has the objective of cutting off the EM waves on a range of frequencies so that it will not create any interference and will not damage the functionality and integrity of electronic systems (besides protecting passengers). One solution among many others (compounding, coating, overmolded or impregnated conductive fabrics, conductive polymers…) consists in compounding a polymer with conductive fillers (carbon black/graphite/fibers, stainless steel fibers, nickel coated CF, graphene, (multi-wall) carbon nanotubes, metallic oxydes…). In order to optimize such a formulation and to quantify the influence of the microstructure (filler dimensions, orientation, …) on the shielding efficiency, simulation could be potentially a useful tool.
Since the electrical conductivity seems to be correlated with the EM shielding efficiency, the idea is to predict the conductivity of compounds characterized by fillers embedded in a matrix=polymer. This is done by running FEA calculations on Representative Volume elements (RVE), similar to what we performed successfully in the past for some basic mechanical and thermal properties.