Effective thermal conductivity of metal and non-metal particulate composites with interfacial thermal resistance at high volume fraction of nano to macro-sized spheres

In this study, we propose a theoretical model to compute the effective thermal conductivity of metal and dielectric spherical particle reinforced composites with interfacial thermal resistance. We consider a wide range of filler volume fraction with sizes ranging from nano-to macro-scale. The model, based on the differential effective medium theory, accounts for particle interactions through two sets of volume fraction corrections. The first correction accounts for a finite volume of composite and the second correction introduces a self-crowding factor that allows us to develop an accurate model for particle interaction even for high volume fraction of fillers. The model is examined to other published models, experiments, and numerical simulations for different types of composites. We observe an excellent agreement between the model and published datasets over a wide range of particle volume fractions and material properties of the composite constituents. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.