Estimation of thermal conductivity of low thermal conductive solid materials using the jet flush method

Abstract

A novel and practical transient-type technique named as “Jet Flush” is proposed for measuring temperature-dependent thermal conductivity of solid materials with low thermal conductivity. In order to estimate thermal conductivity of the sample, its surface is exposed to an impinging air jet flow with higher (or lower) temperature than the sample for a short period of time, while an infrared thermometer records the heated (or cooled) surface temperature history. A nonlinear 1D inverse heat conduction problem with constant convective heat transfer coefficient on the boundary condition is then employed for determining the temperature-dependent thermal conductivity using the measured temperatures. As a requirement for solving the inverse problem, the convective coefficient on the surface of the sample is measured in a separate experiment with the same flow condition using a standard sample. Sensitivity and error analyses are performed to discuss the effects of the estimation points (the temperatures in which the thermal conductivity is to be estimated), and the simplification assumption of constant convective heat transfer coefficient (with respect to time) on the solution of the inverse problem and the accuracy of the estimated results. In order to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed method, the thermal conductivities of three polymer-type materials (HDPE, PMMA and PA6) are measured over the temperature range of ~22–62 °C, and the results are found to be in good agreement with literature data. Moreover, the uncertainty analysis performed in this study showed that the accuracy of the proposed method can be better than 5% for an appreciable temperature range.