Calculating the Effective Thermal Conductivity of Carbon Nanotube Reinforced Polymer

Abstract

The excellent properties of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) make them appropriate for polymer matrix which leads huge interest to nanocomposites. In this paper, the effective thermal conductivity of RVEs which were reconstructed in Mahdavi et al[1] is calculated. A computer code (MATLAB) is developed in such a way that it calculates the effective thermal conductivity of a nanocomposite using Mori-Tanaka method. In this procedure, some nanotubes of each RVE were chosen and they entered to an empty RVE that its polymer matrix is the nanocomposite’s polymer. Then the effective thermal conductivity for this RVE was calculated, and this step was repeated with a new polymer matrix that its thermal conductivity is the effective thermal conductivity of the last step. These increments were repeated until to reach to the total number of nanotubes in the primary RVE, and the effective thermal conductivity in the last step is the effective thermal conductivity of primary RVE. Results show that the RVEs that had higher aspect ratio (same length, but smaller diameters) have higher effective thermal conductivity.