Particle-reinforced composite materials have been widely used as they can exhibit nearly isotropic material properties and are often easy to process. In Civil Engineering applications, for example, concrete can be treated as a composite material consisting of mortar matrix and reinforced by aggregates. In this paper, a statistical micromechanics-based material modelling framework is introduced to describe the macroscopic effective thermal-mechanical properties of the particle-reinforced composite. The formulation differs from most of the existing methods in that the interaction effects among the reinforcing particles are directly accounted for by considering pair-wise interaction and statistical information on particle distribution is included. The strain and stress concentration factor tensors that relate the local average strain and stress fields, respectively, to the corresponding global average fields are derived according to the theory of average fields. The thermal-mechanical interaction within the material will be characterised through the strain and stress concentration factor tensors. Specifically, the effective coefficient of thermal expansion for the particle-reinforced composite material is derived. The results are written in explicit closed-form. Comparisons of the prediction from the proposed framework to the results from other existing methods are presented. Under this proposed framework, no parameter estimation or data fitting is required. The results are expressed in analytical closed-form in terms of the thermal and mechanical properties of the two constituent phases and the volume fraction of particles.

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