A novel method to determine effective thermal conductivity of porous materials

A 2D Lattice-Boltzmann (LB) model is proposed for analyzing the heat conduction process in the porous media. The effective thermal conductivities of several porous materials are calculated by means of this model. The calculated results are found to be in excellent agreement with the experimental data of the existing references. The factors affecting the effective thermal conductivity of porous materials are discussed. The results show that the effective thermal conductivity is strongly dependent upon the porosity and the pore structure and only has imperceptible dependence on the pore density. Then the correlation for estimating the effective thermal conductivity of the porous material is established. This LB model can be used conveniently to calculate and analyze the heat conduction problems of porous media or other materials with complex geometry boundary in pore scale.