Determination of effective thermal conductivity for polyurethane foam by use of fractal method

Abstract

The microstructure of polyurethane foam is disordered, which influences the foam heat conduction process significantly. In this paper foam structure is described by using the local area fractal dimension in a certain small range of length scales. An equivalent element cell is constructed based on the local fractal dimensions along the directions parallel and transverse to the heat flux. By use of fractal void fraction a simplified heat conduction model is proposed to calculate the effective thermal conductivity of polyurethane foam. The predicted effective thermal conductivity agrees well with the experimental data.