Experimental and numerical study for effective thermal conductivity of metallic honeycomb sandwich structures

Effective thermal conductivity is an essential parameter to investigate thermal properties of metallic honeycomb sandwich structures. And it cannot be measured by traditional methods due to sandwich structure imbedded with air. A practical experimental equipment was designed to evaluate the value under different temperature from 100°C to 400°C. And it was found that the value of effective thermal conductivity can also be calculated by knowing the thermal conductivity of the reference, thickness of the reference and the slope and intercept of temperature in different layers. Meanwhile, numerical simulation was conducted and the results agreed well with that achieved by experiment. Also, the value of effective thermal conductivity calculated by experiment is close to the value calculated by Swann-Pittman empirical equation. And the method is not limited in metallic honeycomb sandwich structure while it can be applied in most structures with amounts of air. On that basis, heat transfer process of the structure is discussed including heat conduction, heat convection and heat radiation.