Modelling and Simulation of Thermo-Physical Property of Composite Material

Thermo-physical property measurement is a significant methodology as these properties are the input for designing thermal systems. Properties of materials like thermal conductivity, thermal diffusivity and specific heat capacity has to be estimated in prior to estimate the thermal performance of any material. In the present work, numerical simulations were performed to estimate the thermo-physical properties of a polymer based composite material using porous medium modelling. The weight fraction of the composites and fibres are incorporated into the simulations through porosity. The transient heat diffusion equation are solved using ANSYS Fluent for a polymer based composite material using semi-infinite transient conduction approach. The thermal conductivity and thermal diffusivity are estimated simultaneously for various volume fractions of polyester and banana fibre. The temporal temperature distribution data predicted from ANSYS Fluent is curve fitted using MATLAB and the obtained values of thermal conductivity and thermal diffusivity are compared with the previously reported experimental results and are found to be within a deviation of 7 % for all cases.