Measurement and analysis of thermal conductivity of rubber powder based on transient hot wire method

A prototype of experimental apparatus was designed for measuring the thermal conductivity of powder materials based on the transient hot wire method in the present work. Several different sample materials, including dry ground tire rubber powder (D-GTR), GTR with pine tar and GTR with coal tar, were adopted for the detecting of the relationship between the bulk density ρ and thermal conductivity λ. It is found that a linear behavior is shown between ρ and λ, i.e. increasing ρ can effectively enhance λ. However, different influences of the pine tar and coal tar on the thermal conductivity are found through comparison of the results in which the most significant effect affecting the thermal conductivity of GTR powder is presented for the coal tar. The contact area among particles, content of air and different thickness of tar coating are contributed to these differences in this work.