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• Veyhl, C
• Fiedler, T
• Herzig, T
• Öchsner, A
• Bernthaler, T
• Belova, I
• Murch, G
• [+] on Google Scholar
• Veyhl, C
• Fiedler, T
• Herzig, T
• Öchsner, A
• Bernthaler, T
• Belova, I
• Murch, G
• [+] on PubMed
• Veyhl, C
• Fiedler, T
• Herzig, T
• Öchsner, A
• Bernthaler, T
• Belova, I
• Murch, G

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Metals 2012, 2(2), 113-121; doi:10.3390/met2020113

Article

Thermal Conductivity Computations of Sintered Hollow Sphere Structures

Christoph Veyhl ^1,* , Thomas Fiedler ¹ , Tobias Herzig ² , Andreas Öchsner ^1,3 , Timo Bernthaler ² , Irina V. Belova ¹  and Graeme E. Murch ¹

¹ Centre for Mass and Thermal Transport in Engineering Materials, School of Engineering, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia ² Department of Surface Engineering and Materials Science, Faculty of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, University of Applied Sciences Aalen, Aalen 73430, Germany ³ Department of Solid Mechanics and Design, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Technical University of Malaysia, UTM Skudai, Johor 81310, Malaysia

* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Received: 17 April 2012; in revised form: 10 May 2012 / Accepted: 14 May 2012 / Published: 30 May 2012

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Selected Papers from the 7th International Conference on Porous Metals and Metallic Foams (MetFoam 2011))

Download PDF Full-Text [339 KB, uploaded 30 May 2012 14:29 CEST]

Abstract: The thermal conductivity of sintered hollow sphere structures (HSS) is investigated within the scope of this paper. For this purpose, finite element analyses based on micro-computed tomography images are performed on HSS structures. The complex geometry of the real sintered HSS sample is accurately captured with this new hybrid method. The numerical computations are investigated in three perpendicular directions (i.e., x, y and z) in order to examine the anisotropic material behaviour. The results indicate that sintered HSS reveals quasi-isotropic behaviour in terms of effective thermal conductivity. For the first time, the influence of the sphere wall thickness of real HSS is investigated. To this end, the computed tomography data is carefully manipulated by changing the thickness of the hollow sphere wall. The variation of the wall thickness alters the relative density and has a significant influence on the thermal conductivity. The influence of the relative density on the thermal conductivity reveals a linear dependency.

Keywords: hollow sphere structure; cellular material; micro-computed tomography; finite element analysis; thermal conductivity

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