Thermal Properties of Titanium Boride Particle Reinforced Pure Aluminum Composites

20vol. % TiB2 particle dispersed pure aluminum composites were fabricated by spark plasma sintering process. Before sintering, two types mixing processes was performed in order to obtain the composites with different dispersivity of particles by dry and wet mixing process. The dispersibility was estimated by two-dimensional local number (LN2D), quantitatively. TiB2 particles in the composites fabricated from dry process shows higher clustering behavior than that from wet process. On the other hand, the density of the composites fabricated from dry and wet processes is 99.8% and 97.0 %, respectively. The electrical conductivity and the thermal conductivity was estimated. As increasing dispersibility of the particles, the electrical conductivity was depredated. This tendency was verified by theoretical model, but the experimental value was lower than theoretical value, which is affected by the plastic deformation region in matrix around the particles introduced by the difference of thermal expansion of TiB2 and Al. On the other hand, the thermal conductivity of the composites fabricated by dry process is 119.2W/mK, which is higher than that by wet process (117.2 W/mK) in spite of the degradation of relative density, which is caused by the dispersibility of particles in composites.