Analytical heat conduction model of a composite material based on complete spatial randomness of filler in base matrix

In this work, we propose a novel analytical model to obtain the thermal conductivity of a composite material comprising of filler particles randomly distributed in a base matrix. The model assumes complete spatial randomness of the filler particles in the matrix and this can be described by Poisson's distribution. This concept has been applied to arrive at the thermal conductivity of a composite material with Aluminium powder as the filler in the Epoxy matrix. The results obtained by the proposed model have been compared with the experimental results as well as with the other established models such as Maxwell model, Bruggeman model, Lewis - Nielsen model, Russell model and Rule of Mixtures. This comparison reveals that the proposed model predicts the experimental results more accurately than the others. Also the proposed model is able to predict the experimental results of thermal conductivity of Aluminium-Epoxy composite over the entire temperature range from 4.2 K to 300 K. When applied to other published experimental data of similar composites, the model is found to predict the results fairly well with minimal aberrations. Due to the non-empirical nature of the proposed model, perhaps it may be useful for the prediction of other properties of composite materials involving the filler in a base matrix. (C) 2017 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.