Influence of radiation heat transfer on parallel hot-wire thermal conductivity measurements of semi-transparent materials at high temperature

Abstract

This paper presents a study of the influence of the radiation transfer on the thermal conductivity measurement in a parallel hot-wire method at high temperature. Simulations of the temperature evolution are first carried out with COMSOL Multiphysics® using the coupled conduction–radiation module based on the P1 approximation for the radiation calculation. A wide range of conditions were investigated: a low and a high density insulator were considered with various radiation characteristics (purely scattering, absorbing and scattering, purely absorbing) and with temperature varying up to 1500°C. This study enables the determination of the validity limit of the modeling of the temperature by a purely conductive model with an equivalent conductivity based on the Rosseland approximation. When this assumption is valid, a new estimation process was proposed to improve the estimation accuracy of the thermal properties. A calibration process of the distance between the hot-wire and the thermocouple has also been proposed and validated, enabling a more accurate estimation of the volume heat capacity.An experimental study carried out on three insulating materials with densities ranging from 581kgm−3 to 910kgm−3 and at temperatures ranging from 20°C to 1200°C confirms the results of the theoretical study. Finally, a method enabling the estimation of the extinction coefficient from thermal conductivity measurements at various temperatures is presented and successfully applied to the three tested materials.