A numerical and experimental study on the effective thermal conductivity of conductive hollow tube composite

Abstract

In this article, a three-dimensional (3D) finite elements method has been developed for predicting the effective thermal conductivity (ETC) of a conductive hollow tube polymer composite. 3D Representative Volume Element (3D-RVE) was used to represent the composite material. Governing heat transfer equations in both transverse and longitudinal directions for predicting the effective thermal conductivities of composites are used. ETC was numerically calculated using COMSOLTM software. The guarded hot plate method was used to measure the composites conductivities consisting of epoxy resin matrix filled with metallic hollow tube. A comparison between the numerically calculated thermal conductivities, measured and analytical ones for various samples was made. A satisfactory agreement between numerical and experiment takes place.