The effective thermal conductivity of double-reinforced composites

Polymer based composite materials have a great potential for applications in tribology as dry lubricants since the components comprising the composition may be chosen to fit to various tribological requirements. It is however well known that heat transfer and thermal effects are important for such systems. Systematic experimental studies of temperature effects are time consuming and expensive. In this work, we use a numerical homogenization approach in order to study the principal influence of key composite descriptors of fiber and particle reinforced PEEK on the homogenized heat conductivity. It turns out that the sensitivity of this key parameter on the descriptors can be nicely fitted to a regression model and thus allows for interpolation in the sense of a structure-property-relationship.