Investigation of Production of Nanofiber Nonwoven Fabric and its Thermal Properties

Abstract

Nanofibers of polypropylene were produced by a modified melt-blowing method. The manufacturing method and thermal characteristics of fabricated nonwoven-fabric nanofibers were studied. Apparent thermal conductivity was measured as an evaluation of adiabatic properties, and a prediction model was developed with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) based on a one-dimensional computer-aided engineering method. In addition, we attempted to evaluate true thermal conductivity in consideration of lateral heat dissipation during measurement by thickness. Consequently, we determined the influence of the fiber diameter and thickness of the nonwoven fabric on the thermal conductivity and demonstrated that the proposed CFD model was effective for estimating the characteristics of the thermal conductivity of the nonwoven fabric.