The present investigation aims to evaluate the thermal conduction behavior of closed-cell porous media through micromechanical modeling. Numerical analyses were conducted using the finite element method. The overall thermal conductivity of the model structures, encompassing a range of porosity and pore geometry were investigated. Attention is devoted to the effective response as a function of the two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) porous microstructures. The model geometries were generated based on non-overlapping pore topologies arranged in an orderly manner so the unit-cell modeling approach can be used. The sensitivity of the results to pore morphology was examined by comparing the normalized effective thermal conductivities, and by comparing the numerical results with available analytical models. It was found that the effective thermal conductivity is insensitive to the spatial arrangement, clustering, and size distribution of closed pores. Elliptical pores with mixed orientations lead to lower conductivity compared to circular pores. An analytical expression can be used to convert 2D numerical results to 3D, and its general applicability was assessed in this study.
