A fundamental solution based FE model for thermal analysis of nanocomposites

Abstract

This paper presents a fundamental solution (FS) based finite element (FE) formulation for analyzing the axisymmetric thermal behavior of composites enhanced with carbon nanofibers (CNFs) or carbon nanotubes (CNTs), which are modeled by a cylindrical representative volume element (RVE). The proposed approach utilizes the axisymmetric FS to construct an intra-element approximate field within the element and describes the element boundary field using conventional shape functions. A new hybrid variational functional is developed to establish a linkage between the independent intra-element field and the element boundary fields and generate the final force-displacement equations. Several numerical examples are considered to assess the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed model. The results show that the radius of the nanofiller and the thickness of the interface have little effect on thermal conductivity of the composites, whereas the length of the nanofiller and the material parameters of the interface play an important role in the effective thermal conductivity of the composites.