Thermal behaviour of epoxy resin filled with high thermal conductivity nanopowders

The improvement of heat conduction in electrical power equipment has become a very important issue. Thermoplastic and thermosetting polymers, which are mainly used for their insulating properties, have a relatively low thermal conductivity. One approach to change this is to introduce inorganic fillers which have high thermal conductivities compared to the polymer matrix. In this exploratory work we used commonly available bisphenol-A epoxy resin as a host material and high thermal conductivity nanopowders as fillers. Two types of nanopowders with different particles sizes and different ways of production have been used in this study. The content of nanopowder in the samples was varied from 0.5 to 10 % by weight. Morphological characterization of the prepared nanocomposites was carried out by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The different models for predicting the thermal conductivity for two phase system are compared with experimental data of nanosized aluminum nitride and boron nitride particles filled epoxy composites. The Agari&Uno model correlated best with the experimental data.