Comments on the paper “New model to evaluate the effective thermal conductivity of three-phase soils, Fabio Gori, Sandra Corasaniti, International Communications in Heat and Mass Transfer, 47(2013)16”

Abstract

This comment concerns a rightful doubt involved in the above paper. In the reviewed article, a novel model without empirical constants was proposed to evaluate the effective thermal conductivity of three-phase soils, and such a model was claimed to be workable for soils with porosity ranging from 0.0349 to 0.4764 at all saturation degrees. However, sufficient reasons and pictorial explanations were given in this comment to prove its inapplicability for high degrees of saturation. Besides, the inapplicable range is constantly changing, depending on the porosity, i.e. the larger the porosity, the smaller the inapplicable saturation region. Similar issues were further discussed due to its great influence on the follow-up research in this field, i.e. whether can achieve a full coverage of the applicable saturation range [0,1] for a given porosity.