Numerical study on effective thermal conductivity of polymer composites with randomly distributed multi-fillers

Abstract

This paper presents a numerical investigation of the effective thermal conductivity (hereafter, ETC) of polymer composites with randomly distributed multi-fillers. A finite element method combined with a user-defined code was proposed to predict the ETC under various effects. Consequently, the polymer composite structure was well generated for single, hybrid, and particularly triple fillers. The numerical results were thoroughly validated by comparing them with the prediction models, as well as numerical and experimental results in the literature. The highly complex behavior of the ETC in terms of effective parameters is first explored. The ETC of the triple-filled polymer composite improves compared with single and hybrid fillers only if the different filler‟s TCs are used. Otherwise, the ETC slightly reduces if the filler‟s TCs have the same value. The results obtained are very useful in understanding the complex behavior of the ETC of polymer composites with multiple fillers.