EXPERIMENTAL DETERMINATION OF THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY OF CORTICAL BONE WITH HEAT LOSS ESTIMATION

This paper presents an experimental measurement of the thermal conductivity of bovine cortical bone by an improved parallel plate method to increase the accuracy of the measurement. An experimental apparatus was designed to measure the thermal conductivity of the cortical bone using a reference material with a known thermal conductivity by the heat transfer through the samples. To improve the measurement accuracy, a reference material was selected as quartz, which is of the same order of magnitude of the thermal conductivity of bovine cortical bone reported in the existing literature. Additionally, the temperatures at the heat source and heat sink were set to +/-5 degrees C from the ambient temperature to reduce the inevitable heat loss in the measurement. The temperature offset was determined numerically. The current experimental measurement was validated by an in-house finite-difference numerical program. The heat loss in the measurement was predicted from the numerical program. The thermal conductivity of the bovine cortical bone was then determined to be 0.55 +/- 0.02 W/mK with compensating heat loss.