Thermal properties of composite materials with a complex fractal structure

TL;DR

This study investigates how complex fractal structures of magnetite inclusions in polyester resin composites affect their thermal properties, revealing anisotropic effects and correlating structure complexity with thermal response.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of the impact of fractal and anisotropic inclusion structures on thermal conductivity in composite materials, combining experimental and theoretical approaches.

Findings

Anisotropic samples show decreased thermal conductivity.

Elongated inclusion structures influence thermal behavior.

Multifractal analysis correlates structure complexity with thermal response.

Abstract

In this work, we report the thermal characterization of platelike composite samples made of polyester resin and magnetite inclusions. By means of photoacoustic spectroscopy and thermal relaxation, the thermal diffusivity, conductivity and volumetric heat capacity of the samples were experimentally measured. The volume fraction of inclusions was systematically varied in order to study the changes in the effective thermal conductivity of the composites. In some samples, a static magnetic field was applied during the polymerization process resulting in anisotropic inclusion distributions. Our results show a decrease in the thermal conductivity of some of the anisotropic samples compared to the isotropic randomly distributed ones. Our analysis indicates that the development of elongated inclusion structures leads to the formation of magnetite and resin domains causing this effect. We correlate the complexity of the inclusion structure with the observed thermal response by a multifractal and lacunarity analysis. All the experimental data are contrasted with the well known Maxwell-Garnett's effective media approximation for composite materials.