Effect of shape, size and content on the effective thermal conductivity BeO filled polymer composites

Abstract

Particulate filled polymeric composites with enhanced thermo-physical properties are highly in demand in electronic industry. This project presents a numerical and analytical investigation on the thermal conductivity enhancement of Beryllium oxide filled polymer composites In the numerical study, the finite-element package ANSYS is used to calculate the conductivity of the composites. Three-dimensional cube-in-cube and sphere-in-cube lattice array models are used to simulate the microstructure of composite materials for various filler size and concentration. This study reveals that the incorporation of Beryllium oxide particulates results in improvement of thermal conductivity of polymer resin. The experimentally measured conductivity values are compared with the numerically calculated ones and it is found that the values obtained for various composite models using finite element method (FEM) are in reasonable agreement with the experimental values.