• Journal of the Korean Geotechnical Society
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• v.40 no.4
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• pp.7-18
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• 2024

Because of their mineral composition, tire chips have very low thermal conductivity compared with natural geomaterials, leading to the use of sand-tire rubber mixtures in thermally insulating applications. However, systematic studies evaluating factors affecting the thermal conductivity of sand-tire rubber mixtures have been very limited. Thus, this study investigated the thermal conductivity of sand-tire rubber mixtures with varying size ratios and tire chip fractions according to the degree of saturation (S). Specimens were prepared in insulated cells, and thermal needle probe tests were performed. In addition, the contact angle and solid surface free energy of sand-tire rubber mixtures were investigated. The results of this study revealed that the thermal conductivity decreased with increasing tire chip fraction but increased with increasing water content (or S). However, the trend of increasing thermal conductivity with S varied with the tire chip fraction, and the specimens with tire chip fraction > 0.4 clearly showed a delayed increase in thermal conductivity with increasing S. This reflected that hydrophobic particles (tire chip) affected the dependency of thermal conductivity on S because of the delayed formation of capillary water bridges, which served as additional thermal conduction paths with increased moisture content.