Thermal Conductivity of Solids

Thermal Conductivities of solids have to be measured experimentally since they depend on many factors that are difficult to measure or predict. For instance in crystalline materials, the phase and crystallite size are important. In porous solids, the thermal conductivity heavily relies on void fraction, pore size and the fluid contained in the pores (e.g. air, etc.)

For this project to be useful to the CENG 402 course, the program designed focused on compounds that are involved in problems from the Byrd, Stewart, and Lightfoot text: Transport Phenomena, 2nd edition. Therefore, the program was made to be used for several pure metals and two other materials: corning glass and ceramic.

The program is entitled kscalc and was created to be used in the ceng301 module in matlab with the structks.mat To download the struct, just right click the link and select "save as." Duh.

To make the program, we gathered data from books and plotted the points for each compound in Excel. Then, we fit a polynomial to the data and loaded the coefficients into a program, kscalc.m. You can download this like you did the struct. Duh.

Here is the link to the data we used. Below are the plots generated.

Texts Consulted for project:

Section 9.5 of Transport Phenomena, 2nd Edition, Printing #2 by Bird,Stewart,Lightfoot.2002 (New York City)

Powell, R. W., Ho, C. Y., Liley, P. E. Thermal Conductivity of Selected Materials. National Bureau of Standards vol. 8, November 1966. (Washington D.C.)

Powell, R. W., Ho, C. Y., Liley, P. E. Thermal Conductivity of Selected Materials Part 2. National Bureau of Standards vol. 16, February, 1968 (Washington D.C.).