Thermal Insulation Characteristics of Roll Forming Alumina Ball Material

Abstract Rolling ceramic thermal insulation balls have advantages of low cost, large output and easy control of particle size, so it is likely to become the main raw material for 3D printing in the future, but there is little research on its thermal insulation. In this study, we used three kinds of rolling aluminum oxide balls as raw materials to obtain single-granularity-level and multi-granularity-level bulk materials. And the effects of temperature, particle size, and thermal fatigue times on the thermal conductivity of the samples were analyzed. Additionally, the experimental results were verified by FloEFD heat conduction simulation software using finite analysis method to analyze their heat conduction characteristics. With the increase of temperature from 400 °C to 1500 °C, the thermal conductivity of single-granularity-level and multi-granularity-level bulk materials increased linearly. The thermal conductivity of single-granularity-level bulk materials have no direct relationship with the particle size, and the thermal conductivity of multi-granularity-level materials with small particle size difference was a bit lower than that of materials with large particle size difference, and a bit higher than that of materials with single-granularity-level. The simulation results showed that the main reason for the above phenomenon was that the point contact between particles played a dominating role in the heat transfer process. When the contact area increased, the thermal conductivity increased obviously, and the thermal conductivity with the increasing of temperature decreased in a quadratic curve. The improved model considering the shrinkage could improve accuracy of simulation results. Heat flux at the surface contact area was 10.19 times higher than that of the point contact and 15.10 times higher than that of the solid-gas contact at 400 °C. Therefore, reducing the surface contact area and increasing the porosity could significantly reduce the thermal conductivity of the materials.