Experimental investigation of high temperature thermal contact resistance of thin disk samples using infrared camera in vacuum condition

Abstract

High temperature thermal contact resistance between materials has significant influence on thermal design of many engineering applications. In this paper, an experimental setup was established to measure thermal contact resistance at high temperature based on steady state method. A data processing technique was developed to determine the thermal contact resistance. Moreover, the employment of thin disk samples was proved to be effective to ensure 1D axial heat flow by numerical prediction. The analyzed uncertainty of the test method is less than 10% with the validation of repeating experiments of HTA–HTA (high temperature Inconel 718 alloy). Additionally, thermal contact resistance of HTA–HTA, ZrB2/SiC/C–ZrB2/SiC/C (carbon fiber reinforced zirconium diboride and silicon carbide based composite) and HTA–ZrB2/SiC/C were investigated varied with the temperature ranging from 630 to 1100 K and the pressure ranging from 0.1 to 0.6 MPa. The results show that thermal contact resistance decreases with increasing the interface temperature as the enhancement of radiative heat transfer. At the same time, thermal contact resistance decreases with increasing the interface pressure due to the increase of contact area, and the effects of pressure on thermal contact resistance is much lower at high temperature.