RETICULATED SIC FOAM X-RAY CT, MESHING, AND SIMULATION

摘要

Silicon carbide ceramic foams are currently employed in applications such as porous burners and heat exchangers where high thermal loads are applied. These loads can be extremely severe and, up to date; the only reliable routine to assess components performances is the time and money consuming "trial and error" method. Furthermore, due to the irregular foam shape, tests must be repeated several times for statistical reasons.rnThis paper presents a methodology to simulate ceramic foams effective thermal conductivities from 3D meshes built up from CT output data. A first commercial code combines image filtering and segmentation followed by object surface meshing. Further meshing refinement and volumetric meshing is done with another software.rnMeshes are than imported into a FEA code and thermal loads applied allowing to simulate heat fluxes through foam ligaments. Foam effective thermal conductivity is then calculated and results compared with values obtained with experimental data and literature.