Advanced thermal insulation layers with a row of heat pipes (1st Report, Analysis)

This study is concerned with the improvement in performance of insulating porous layers which contain a thermal screen consisting of a row of heat pipes. Numerical analysis shows that the thermal screen, which is set parallel with heated and cooled surfaces, introduces strong uniformity in temperature distributions such that conduction temperature profiles are approached. Thus, it is found that the thermal screen can reduce the average Nusselt number Num for the insulating porous layers and improve the performance of the insulation.