Abstract The proper thermal diagnostics of pipeline insulation is an important problem. The heat losses from the pipelines depend distinctly on the quality of this insulation. Changes in weather conditions cause transient accumulation of energy in the pipeline insulation and may cause difficulties during evaluation of the quality of the pipeline thermal insulation. Generally, the goal of this investigation was to identify the scale of energy accumulation inside thermal insulation. This is important because during the calculation of heat losses from thermal pipelines on the basis of infrared camera temperature measurement results usually a steady thermal state inside the insulation is assumed. In order to determine the distributions of the temperature inside the insulation, the calculations of the temperature changes inside the pipeline insulation for real changeable meteorological conditions with the use of software ansys-fluent and others have been carried out. Both the heat transfer between the inner pipeline tube and outer pipeline shell and energy accumulation inside the pipeline elements were considered. For the pipeline insulation evaluation purpose, different coefficients for the analysis of energy accumulation scale were defined and used. The measurement results of the temperature of inner pipeline tube and outer pipeline shell gathered during the operation of the special experimental rig were used as input data for the aforementioned numerical simulations. In these calculations, they constituted the first (Dirichlet's) boundary condition. The conclusions resulting from this work are useful for specialists involved in the technical evaluation of the thermal protection features of pipelines.
This work presents the method of improving the accuracy of temperature measurement results obtained by means of long-wave infrared camera equipped with focal plane array detector. The typical accuracy of infrared cameras specified by their manufacturers amounts to ±2 K or ±2 % of the measured value of temperature. Very often a better accuracy of the measurements is required, e.g. during the measurements of human body temperature. To improve the measurement accuracy an external correction of obtained results on the basis of comparison measurement of black body temperature and next with use of MATLAB package has been proposed. Nomenclature a - coefficient, constant, 1/K b - coefficient, constant 2 1 c c , - first and second radiant constant, respectively, W·m 2 or m·K C - calibration coefficient
Knowledge of a material thermal conductivity is essential in several engineering applications. This material property serves also as a measure of the quality of manufactured materials. Nowadays, a lot of effort is directed into development of non-destructive, fast and reliable measurement techniques. In the works of Adamczyk et al. [1] and Kruczek et al. [10], a new in situ conductivity measurement technique for an anisotropic material was developed. This method, due to its rapidity and nondestructive character, can be embedded in a manufacturing process. However, despite many advantages, the developed measuring technique has some drawbacks corresponding to the applied mathematical model, which is used for determining the material thermal conductivities. It neglects the effect of heat losses due to radiation and convection phenomena on the calculated values of thermal conductivities. In this work, the computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling was applied to estimate heat losses due to radiation and convection. The influence of omitting the radiative and convective heat transfer on the predicted temperature field and calculated thermal conductivities was investigated. Evaluated numerical results were compared against experimental data by using the developed in situ measurement technique for the thermal conductivity of anisotropic materials.