Mechanical Design

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Browsing Mechanical Design by Author "Abrahaley, Eukubay"

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    Numerical Determination of The Effect of Filler Volume Fraction, Geometry, And Temperature on Thermal and Mechanical Property of Polymer Nanocomposites
    (Addis Ababa University, 2021-03) Abrahaley, Eukubay; Addis, Kidane (PhD)
    Some of the engineering materials cannot be standalone for specific applications due to certain limitations of their property. To overcome this limitation, different constitutes mix with other materials to produce a composite material with a shared property for desired engineering applications. For example, polymer material’s low thermal and mechanical property is solved by incorporating nanofillers with different volume fraction and shapes. In such cases, the performance is determined by the combined effect of the inclusion’s geometry, volume fraction, and operating temperatures. Understanding the role of nanoparticle distribution, size, geometry, and temperature on polymer nanocomposites' thermal and mechanical properties help to design materials with infallible mechanical and thermal behaviors. In this work, the role of nano silicate particle volume fraction, geometries/aspect ratio, and the working temperature on the effective thermal conductivity and elastic modulus of the epoxy matrix composites are analyzed numerically using the finite element method and mean-field homogenization approaches. The result furtherly validates with analytical models and experimental results taken from the literature. The effective thermal conductivity and young modulus of the polymer nanocomposite material are increased with the increasing of the nano silicate volume fraction within the epoxy matrix. Besides, ellipsoid nano silicate particles give more improved properties than spherical nanoscopic inclusion of the same volume fraction. The proposed finite element method was effective in estimating the effective thermal conductivity of the composite material for both spherical and ellipsoidal geometries of nanoscopic fillers. On the other hand, the analytical model better predicted the composite material’s effective young modulus of spherical inclusions. The effect of temperature on the nanocomposite’s effective thermal conductivity and modulus of elasticity is also estimated following similar approaches. The nanocomposite’s effective thermal conductivity of the polymer composite material increases with temperature, but the effective modulus of elasticity/stiffness decreases with temperature.