Jianming Zhang

Evaluation of effective thermal conductivity of CNT‐based nano‐composites by element free Galerkin method

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the thermal properties of carbon nanotube composites via meshless element free Galerkin (EFG) method.Design/methodology/approach – The EFG method is based on moving least square approximation, which is constructed by three components: a weight function associated with each node, a basis function and a set of non‐constant coefficients. In principle, EFG method is almost identical to finite element method. The EFG method does not require elements for the interpolation (or approximation) of field variable, but only requires a set of nodes for the construction of approximation function.Findings – The equivalent thermal conductivity of the composite has been calculated, and plotted against nanotube length, nanotube radius, RVE length, and RVE radius. Temperature distribution has been obtained and plotted with RVE length. An approximate numerical formula is proposed to calculate the equivalent thermal conductivity of CNT‐composites. Present computations show th...