Thermal conductance analysis reveals exact edge effects in composites
The conductance filtration: sink-relative persistence and exact edge sensitivity for heat transport in particle-filled composites
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Summary
Measuring heat flow in materials made of particles inside another material is tricky because heat can pass in different ways. The authors create a new way to describe these different heat paths as types of branches and track how important each is using a graph-based method. They show how changing one connection precisely affects overall heat flow and identify exactly how much heat each kind of connection carries. This helps better understand and diagnose heat flow in complex materials.
What this means in practice
- •For materials engineers: Diagnose how heat flows through composite materials by precisely attributing heat conduction to different contact types within the material.
- •For thermal management teams: Predict exact changes in heat dissipation caused by modifying single connections in composite thermal interfaces to optimize cooling designs.
Authors
Daisuke Yasufuku
Abstract
We formulate the thermal conductance $g_e$ of a particle pair as three branch types -- contact, near-contact and bond -- within a single construction, and we introduce the filtration that takes this $g_e$ as its axis (the conductance filtration) together with persistence taken relative to the sink boundary. We then show that the dissipation share is exactly the logarithmic sensitivity of the effective conductance, and that a finite change of a single edge is predicted exactly in closed form. The allocation of the dissipation among branch types, and the idealisation ratio of each mechanism (interface, matrix and particle), are thereby obtained as diagnostic quantities on one and the same graph representation.