Porosity effect on the thermal conductivity of sintered powder materials

In this work, the effective thermal conductivity of sintered powder materials is studied. The extensive literature related to the proposed models about this property in all kind of porous materials is reviewed, and a new equation is proposed as a function of the fully dense material conductivity, the porosity of the material and the tap porosity of the starting powder. This equation covers the porosity range of powder aggregates from the tap porosity to zero porosity, and also applies to sintered powders. The proposed equation has been experimentally validated by fitting to experimental data of metallic sintered powder materials measured at room temperature, resulting very good agreements. Also, alternative models proposed by other authors have been fitted to the same experimental data to check the relative goodness of the proposed model. The results allow to conclude that a percolation model can describe the behaviour of the effective thermal conductivity of sintered powder materials with low and medium porosity levels.