Development of an Experimental Procedure for Thermal Contact Resistance Estimation at the Glass/Metal Contact Interface

Abstract

In this paper, an experimental device is designed and developed in order to estimate thermal conditions at the glass/metal contact interface. This device is made of two parts: The upper part contains the tool (piston) made of bronze and a heating device to raise the temperature of the piston to 700 °C. The lower part is composed of a lead crucible and a glass sample. The assembly is provided with a heating system, an induction furnace of 6 kW for heating the glass up to 950 °C. The developed experimental procedure has permitted the estimation of the thermal contact resistance (TCR) using a developed measurement principle based on the inverse technique developed by Beck et al. (1985, Inverse Heat Conduction: III Posed Problems, Wiley Inter-science, New York). The semitransparent character of the glass has been taken into account by an additional radiative heat flux and an equivalent thermal conductivity. After the set-up tests, reproducibility experiments for a specific contact pressure have been carried out. Results show a good repeatability of the registered and estimated parameters such as the piston surface temperature, heat flux density, and TCR. The estimated value of TCR reaches 2 × 10−3 K m2/W with a maximum dispersion that does not exceed 6%.