Experimental investigation on temperature-dependent effective thermal conductivity of ceramic fiber felt

This paper presents a method to invert the effective thermal conductivity of ceramic fiber felt under high temperatures using experimentally measured specific heat capacity, density, and transient temperature data. The method combines the solution of the heat transfer equation with an inversion method based on real-valued genetic algorithm (GA) optimization, and 11 target parameters can be simultaneously inverted with one experimental dataset. The effective thermal conductivities of ceramic fiber felt were obtained by inversion under ambient pressures of 2 Pa and 100 kPa, compression ratios of 0.8-1.0, and temperature ranges of 295 similar to 1273 K. The results indicates that the effective thermal conductivities of ceramic fiber felt derived from the inversion method are in concurrence with the outcomes of the steady state method. The effective thermal conductivities of the ceramic fiber felt range from 0.069 to 0.321 W m(-1) K-1. It is observed that the effective thermal conductivity increases with higher temperature, and decreases with growing compression ratio. The impact of ambient pressure on effective thermal conductivity is linked to the level of compression.