Effective thermal conductivity measurement of additively manufactured lattice structures by application of modified temperature profile method

Abstract

This study aims to establish a general-purpose thermal conductivity measurement method that can take into account the effect of heat loss under atmospheric conditions for measuring the effective thermal conductivity of lattice structures, and to clarify the effective thermal conductivity of lattice structures with different wire diameters. In this paper, calculations by finite element method and measurements using steady state comparative-longitudinal heat flow method and modified temperature profile method were performed to clarify the effective thermal conductivity of the five truncated octahedron unit-cell lattice structures with different wire diameters fabricated by additive manufacturing. The modified temperature profile method is developed to take into account the effect of interfacial thermal resistance in the measurement apparatus. The effective thermal conductivity measured by using the steady state comparative-longitudinal heat flow method and calculated with finite element method analysis showed good agreement, confirming that the effective thermal conductivity is strongly dependent on the wire diameter. The effective thermal conductivity obtained by the modified temperature profile (MTP) method was 3–24% smaller than that obtained by the steady state comparative-longitudinal heat flow method, and the measurement was able to take heat loss into account more concretely. Furthermore, measurements using the MTP method enabled us to obtain reasonable values for the ratio of heat loss in each section, the fin efficiency of the sample, the heat transfer coefficient to the surroundings, and the interfacial thermal resistance between the rods and the sample.