EFFECTIVE-MEDIUM APPROACH TO THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY OF HETEROGENEOUS MATERIALS

Thermal conduction behavior of heterogeneous materials has attracted ever increasing research interest and been extensively investigated driven by its technological importance in thermal management systems. It is known that the effective thermal conductivity of heterogeneous materials is strongly dependent on their microstructure, especially the interface. How to understand such dependence is an important topic in this field. In this chapter, we try to summarize the methodology of the effective-medium approach for predicting and calculating the effective thermal conductivity of arbitrary heterogeneous materials, with emphasis on the interface effect, including new progress by incorporating the ballistic phonon transport at nanoscale and Brownian movement in nanofluids. This chapter concludes with an outlook on the future possibilities and scientific challenges in this field.