Experimental study of thermal conductivity measurement of mixture graphite and paraffin wax and effect of graphite mass concentration on thermal conductivity enhancement

This work aims to measure and enhance thermal conductivity of paraffin wax having a melting temperature of 44°C. For this reason, a new apparatus to measure thermal conductivity is presented. The principale of thermal conductivity measurement is to create temperature difference between the main heater and the cooler. Through literature, we remarked that most of experimental investigations have been developed to measure thermal conductivity of materials below 0.2 W/mk and above 5 W/mk. What is new in this work that, we are dealing with materials (mixture paraffin/graphite) having a thermal conductivity between these two values. To enhance thermal conductivity of the paraffin, we used a commercial graphite powder from SGL group Carbon Company in Germany. Then we measured the thermal conductivity of the mixture graphite-paraffin.