Traditionally, for applications that require heat transfer (e.g. heat exchangers),metals have been the go-to material for manufacturers because of their high thermal as
well as structural properties. However, metals have some notable drawbacks. They are
not corrosion-resistant, offer no freedom of design, have a high cost of production, and
sourcing the material itself. Even though polymers on their own don’t show great
prospects in the field of thermal applications, their composites perform better than their
counterparts. Nanofillers, when added to a polymer matrix not only increase their
structural strength but also their thermal performance. This work aims to tackle two of
those problems by using the additive manufacturing method, stereolithography to solve
the problem of design freedom, and the use of polymer nanocomposite material for
corrosion-resistance and increase their overall thermal performance. In this work, three
different concentrations of polymer composite materials were studied: 0.25 wt%, 0.5
wt%, and 1wt% for their thermal conductivity. The samples were prepared by
magnetically stirring them for a period of 10 to 24 hours depending on their
concentrations and then sonicating in an ice bath further for a period of 2 to 3 hours.
These samples were then tested for their thermal conductivities using a Hot Disk TPS
2500S. Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) to study the dispersion of the nanoparticles
in the matrix. Different theoretical models were studied and used to compare
experimental data to the predicted values of effective thermal conductivity. An increase
of 7.9 % in thermal conductivity of the composite material was recorded for just 1 wt%
addition of multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs).