Increasing the Precision of Thermal Properties Measurement by the Periodic Heating Method

Abstract

The development of new thermal insulation materials, technologies and methods for the buildings construction allows for decrease in wasteful consumption of energy resources. Therefore, the knowledge of thermophysical properties is one of the most important tasks because the determination of these characteristics with high accuracy can help to achieve high energy efficiency.
The method and technical device are proposed in this work and can be used for increasing the measurement accuracy and choosing the optimal mode parameters for producing thermal insulation materials. The method for the thermophysical properties measurements is based on the periodic heating method (the third kind regular mode method) and the temperature oscillations made by Peltier element. The mathematical and physical models were developed and the automation of the measurement installation was made with the help of graphical programming environment LabView.
The equipment was calibrated by experiments with standard material - Plexiglas and the obtained data proved the appropriateness of developed mathematical model. After that the number of experiments with the nanomaterial “Nanographite” was performed. With the help of proposed methodology and the experimental setup the strong dependence between thermal diffusivity of “Nanographite” and moisture content was revealed. This fact will be used in further investigations of this new material.