A method to calculate the effective thermal conductivity of spherical particle-laden composite

Abstract

Accurate calculation of the effective thermal conductivity of composite is of great importance. Based on the heat conduction differential equation, the effective thermal conductivity of spherical particle-laden composite was derived in this paper. To validate the calculation method, comparisons with the Maxwell model, Karayacoubian model, Lewis-Nielsen model, Woodside-Messmer model, and the experimental data were conducted. It was found that the results of the present method are closer to the experimental data. Further validation was conducted with comparison to the finite-element simulations. The effective thermal conductivity of a matrix cube with a spherical particle was simulated and calculated. The results obtained by these two methods were consistent with the relative error within 7%.