Numerical simulation for heat transfer of silica-aerogel filled 3-D stitched spacer fabric composites

Abstract

Spacer fabrics and their composites have great advantages of being excellent heat insulation materials because of their cavity structure characteristics. However, there are few researches on the thermal insulation of spacer fabric composites with different spacer shapes and geometric parameters. In this work, stitched spacer fabric composites filled with silica aerogel with rectangular, triangular and trapezoidal spacer shapes and their models were designed. The results of experiments and simulations show that the temperature distribution of spacer fabric composites has good consistency at high temperature. By analyzing the heat transfer results of composites with different geometric parameters, it was found that the length of the connecting layer between the top and bottom layers and the distance between two adjacent sutures in the top layer affect the minimum and maximum temperatures of the top surface.