A Method for Prediction of Thermal Conductivity of Homogeneously Stacked Small Particles

This paper has proposed a model to calculate the thermal conductivity of normally stacked small particles filled with liquid. The particles to be measured are naturally stacked in a container and then saturated with a kind of liquid for which the thermal conductivity is close to that of the particles. With the measured sample effective thermal conductivity and the thermal conductivity of the liquid, the particles’ thermal conductivity can be determined by the proposed model. Numerical simulation showed that the relative error of the particles’ thermal conductivity obtained is no more than 10 % if the ratio of the thermal conductivity of the liquid to the effective thermal conductivity ranges from 0.4 to 2.35. Experiments indicated that the particles’ thermal conductivities calculated by the model agree well with their known values.