Thermal contact conductance of spherical, rough metals
- San Jose State Univ., CA (United States). Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
- Texas A and M Univ., College Station, TX (United States). Dept. of Mechanical Engineering
Junction thermal conductance is an important consideration in such applications as thermally induced stresses in supersonic and hypersonic flight vehicles, nuclear reactor cooling, electronics packaging, spacecraft thermal control, gas turbine and internal combustion engine cooling, and cryogenic liquid storage. A fundamental problem in analyzing and predicting junction thermal conductance is thermal contact conductance of non-flat, rough metals. Workable models have been previously derived for the limiting idealized cases of flat, rough and spherical, smooth surfaces. However, until now, no tractable models have been advanced for non-flat, rough surfaces (so called engineering surfaces) which are much more commonly dealt with in practice. The present investigation details the synthesis of previously derived models for macroscopically non-uniform thermal contact conductance and contact of non-flat, rough spheres, into a thermo-mechanical model, its refinement, and its presentation in an easily applied format. The present model is compared to representative experimental conductance results form the literature for stainless steel 304 with widely varying flatness deviation and roughness. Also included in the comparisons is a previous, often cited model for flat, rough metals to which the present model reduces in the limit of flat surfaces. The present model agrees well with the experimental results over the wide ranges of flatness deviation and roughness for which data was available. Conversely, the previous, well known model becomes increasingly overpredictive with increasing flatness deviation.
- OSTI ID:
- 423012
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-960815--; ISBN 0-7918-1509-9
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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