A Comparative Fluxmetric (CFM) Method for Apparent Thermal Conductivity Measurement of Insulating Materials at High Temperature

This article presents a simple thermal characterization method, noted CFM, for the measurement of the apparent thermal conductivity of insulating materials at high temperature (i.e., up to 600 degrees C). The CFM method is a steady-state relative measurement method which requires a calibration. The calibration of the experimental apparatus was done with a calcium silicate board of known thermal conductivity. Thermal conductivity measurements were carried out on a low-density compressible fibrous felt and a high-density calcium silicate board between 100 and 600 degrees C. A good agreement was observed with the values obtained with the guarded hot-plate (GHP) method for the low-density fibrous felt and the parallel hot-wire (PHW) method for the high-density calcium silicate board. The measurement of the apparent thermal conductivities of low-density fibrous felts of different apparent densities, combined with a simple conducto-radiative model, allowed to estimate a mean specific extinction coefficient in good agreement with a value derived from transmittance/reflectance measurements.