Experimental and Numerical Study on Thermal Conductivity of Rice Husk Filled Epoxy Composites

Abstract

In the present work, thermal conductivity of rice husk (200 µm mesh size) filled epoxy composites has been studied experimentally & numerically. In this study, a successful fabrication of a rice husk filled epoxy composite with different filler content is possible by hand lay-up technique. An experimental approach was used to determine the thermal conductivity of rice husk filled epoxy composites using Lee's apparatus. The result shows that for each size of rice husk, the thermal conductivity of composite decreases with increase of filler contents which indicates that the rice husk reinforced epoxy composites have good insulation properties. In addition to experimental analysis, a commercially available finite-element package ANSYS is used to for the numerical analysis. Comparison graphs were plotted for both experimental and numerical analysis. The thermal conductivities of both the methods are very close to each other. The slight deviation between these two is due to the assumptions taken for the FEM analysis that are not real.