Numerical investigation of conductive heat transfer in high-porosity foams

The conductive heat transfer in heterogeneous cellular materials is generally treated by defining the homogeneous effective thermal conductivity. For high-porosity foams, a very large number of empirical or semi-empirical models have already been proposed to evaluate this conductivity. Each approach considered different cellular morphologies and used different solution methods, leading to noticeable discrepancies. In order to estimate the reliability of these models, a numerical finite volume method computing the effective thermal conductivity of discretised two-phase heterogeneous materials was developed. It was applied to different regular open or closed cellular structures and to structures generated from tomographic images of polyvinyl chloride, expanded polystyrene and NiCrAl foams. The comparison with the results of the different models allows their degree of reliability and their domain of applicability to be estimated quantitatively.