Development of plug-ins to predict effective thermal conductivity of woven and microencapsulated phase change composite

Abstract

The thermal property of textile structures plays an important role in the understanding of thermal behaviour of the clothing. In this work, user-friendly GUI plug-ins have been developed to generate both microscopic and mesoscopic scale models for finite element analysis. The plug-ins were developed by using Abaqus/CAE as a platform. The GUI Plug-ins enable automatic model generation and prediction of the effective thermal conductivity of woven composite and microencapsulated Phase Change Materials composites via finite element analysis by applying boundary conditions. The predicted effective thermal conductivities from plug-ins have been compared with the results obtained from published experimental research work based on an established mathematical model. They are correlated well. Moreover, the influence of phase change materials on heat transfer behaviour of microencapsulated Phase Change Materials composites was further analysed.