Fig. 6
Effective chemical potential depending on the size of the RVE
and the mobility parameter of the inclusions. The evolution of the
macroscopic chemical potential \({\overline{\mu }}\) for different realizations of RVEs is depicted as a
function of the divergence of the macroscopic solvent-volume flux
for selected mobility parameters of the inclusions
given by a
\(M_{incl}=10^{-4}~\text {mm}^4/(\text {Ns})\), b
\(M_{incl}=10^{-2}~\text {mm}^4/(\text {Ns})\) and c
\(M_{incl}=10~\text {mm}^4/(\text {Ns})\). We observe that the effective chemical potential
\({\overline{\mu }}\) depends strongly on the size of the RVE.
Furthermore, the effective response of a single periodic unit cell
differs from the effective response of an ensemble of identical
periodic unit cells. The observed discrepancies decrease with
increasing mobility parameter of the inclusions and vanish when nearly
homogeneous microstructures of equal size are considered (e.g., 2RVE11
and RVE22 in b)