Prediction of the effective thermal conductivity of microsphere insulation

Since glass microsphere has high crush strength, low density and small particle size, it becomes alternative thermal insulation material for cryogenic systems, such as storage and transportation tank for cryogenic fluids. Although many experiments have been performed to verify the effective thermal conductivity of microsphere, prediction by calculation is still inaccurate due to the complicated geometries, including wide range of powder diameter distribution and different pore sizes. The accurate effective thermal conductivity model for microsphere is discussed in this paper. There are four mechanisms which contribute to the heat transfer of the evacuated powder: gaseous conduction (kg), solid conduction (ks), radiation (kr) and thermal contact (kc). Among these components, kg and ks were calculated by Zehner and Schlunder model (1970). Other component values for kc and kr, which were obtained from experimental data under high vacuum conditions were added. In this research paper, the geometry of microsphere was simplified as a homogeneous solid sphere. The calculation results were compared with previous experimental data by R. Wawryk (1988), H. S. Kim (2010) and the experiment of this paper to show good agreement within error of 46%, 4.6% and 17 % for each result.