Abstract
High thermal conductivity and small thermal expansion coefficient are property requirements for heat sink materials, and Cu−Mo composite is an attractive one. Owing to the thermal property of Cu−Mo composite which varies much when the microstructure is changing, the composition and microstructure should be carefully designed to achieve appropriate combination of properties. Consequently it is very important to quantitatively evaluate properties of the composite.
In this research, a method that estimates the thermal conductivity of composites directly from their microstructure assisted with Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and Digital Image Based (DIB) technique was investigated. The effective thermal conductivities of rolled anisotropic Cu−Mo composite plates were evaluated parallel to and perpendicular to the rolling direction. The calculated thermal conductivities perpendicular to the rolling direction were compared with experimental data and found they are in good agreement. Hence, the FEA combined with DIB technique is a very helpful method for estimation of effective thermal conductivity of anisotropic composite materials.
