Assessment of Effective Thermal Conductivity of Epoxy-TiO2 Composites

Abstract

The development of microelectronic devices like PCB, electronic packaging etc. requires high thermal conductivity materials for fabrication. This provoke the needs of development of particulate filled polymer matrix composites (PMCs) that possess high thermal conductivity. This research provides a potential material system to address this problem. An analytical model is proposed to estimate the effective thermal conductivity of polymer composites filled with cubical particulate fillers. By using the mathematical correlation developed by this model, effective thermal conductivity is calculated and compared with values obtained from models by previous authors in this regard for different volume fractions (13.4 and 26.8 vol.%) of cubical shaped TiO2 particulates. UnithermTM2022 tester is used to measure the effective thermal conductivity (keff) of epoxy-TiO2 composite for these volume fraction as per ASTM E-1530. These values of effective thermal conductivity (keff) obtained from the experiment are compared with these model developed in previous literature and the proposed model. It is found that the the values of effective thermal conductivity calculated by proposed model are very near to the experimental values of effective thermal conductivity.