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

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 (MicroPCMs) composites via finite element analysis (FEA) 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 and an established mathematical model. They are correlated well. Moreover the influence of PCM on heat transfer behaviour of MicroPCMs composites was further analysed.