Effective Thermal Conductivity of Composites with Different Particle Geometries and Interfacial Thermal Resistance

A new micromechanical method, the weighted residual self-consistent method (WRSCM) is developed to study the effective thermal conductivity of two-phase composites with different particle geometries in the presence of a thermal barrier resistance at the interface between constituents. The imperfect interface involves the continuity of the normal flux but allow for a finite temperature differences across the interface. Within the framework of self-consistent scheme, the effective thermal conductivity of two-phase composite is obtained using numerical iterative method on the basis of a surface integral of temperature over the imperfect interfaces. Numerical results show that for the given composite system, due to the existence of an interfacial thermal resistance, the particle geometries have significant impact on the effective thermal conductivity of composites.