Effect of convective heat transfer coefficient on estimation of effective thermal conductivity of two-phase material

Abstract

Two-phase materials are involved in applications of day to day life, the reason being it is having discrete properties like firmness, required thermal conductivity, durability as well as good impact properties, etc. Thermal conductivity of two-phase material is a basic property to envision its evaluation in engineering. Distinct geometry for example cylinder, spherical, random size particles are being proposed by researchers for computation of effective thermal conductivity (ETC) of material like two-phase. This paper includes a two-dimensional two-phase system with hollow square geometry which is being considered for mathematically deriving an algebraic equation for computing ETC with the inclusion of the convective heat transfer coefficient. A unit cell approach is considered for deriving the equations. The obtained results are validated with the basic available models for distinctive types of two-phase materials. Hollow square model with Ψ = 0.3 gives approximate reasonable agreement for predicting ETC having a mean percentage error of 5.73% which is acceptable.