Design of foamed porous heat-insulating materials using the 3D Voronoi tessellation
Abstract
Design of foamed porous heat-insulating materials using the 3D Voronoi tessellation
Incoming article date: 20.03.2022In this work, the effective thermal conductivity of porous materials is studied by a numerical method. A technique for designing an insulating material with specified geometric characteristics is proposed, which makes it possible to predict the thermal conductivity of porous insulation with sufficient accuracy. The design of foamed porous heat-insulating materials was based on the 3D Voronoi tessellation. The effective thermal conductivity of porous media was determined for twenty structures with different geometric characteristics. The thermophysical properties of the material corresponded to melamine. To verify the numerical solution, the effective thermal conductivity of the melamine sponge was determined experimentally. One regular structure and three irregular structures were compared with each other. The porosity of the insulating structures ranged from 0.722 to 0.987, the fiber diameter ranged from 0.0489 mm to 0.1259 mm. A theoretical solution is proposed for determining the effective thermal conductivity of regular structures. The technique proposed in the work can be used to design heat-insulating materials based on additive technologies, with specified heat-insulating and structural properties.
Keywords: effective thermal conductivity, porous structure, porous insulating material, 3D Voronoi tessellation