Measurement of thermal conductivity of paper and corrugated fibreboard with prediction of thermal performance for design applications

Understanding heat transfer in corrugated fibreboard is important to the design of more effective packaging for industries which involve the freezing and chilling of food. In this work the thermal conductivity of papers which compose corrugated fibreboard were measured and used to validate finite element models of heat transfer in fibreboard. The results showed paper to be highly anisotropic, with thermal conductivity in the machine and cross machine directions being almost an order of magnitude larger than in the thickness direction. The finite element models showed good agreement with experimental results and demonstrated that the majority of heat transfer in corrugated fibreboard is though the fluted medium. Based on the finite element models, simple models for the prediction of the thermal performance of corrugated board were evaluated and shown to be very effective in reproducing the results of the more complex finite element methods. These simple methods can be used to perform corrugated fibreboard design calculations, and the models with and without radiation can be used to provide estimates of the lower and upper bounds of the thermal resistance for a given board design. Graphical abstract