Modelling of fibrous materials used in high temperature applications

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to develop two different ways to investigate the parameters of the fibrous insulation materials from the point of ability of blocking steady-state radiative heat transfer separately and compare them with each other in terms of advantages and disadvantages. In-house developed code is generated in MATLAB®, based on Monte Carlo Ray Tracing (MCRT) technique and ANSYS Fluent® is used as commercial code. Fiber diameter, number of fibers in per row and Solid Volume Fraction (SVF) are used as input parameters of the fibrous insulation material and fibers are assumed as opaque fibers. Fiber diameters are arranged relatively large compared to the wavelength of the radiation to enable to use the rules of geometric scattering. It has been found that radiative heat flux can be decreased by increasing SVF and thickness of the insulation. It is also found that although commercial code requires shorter solution and setup time, our in-house developed code can provide more flexible investigation. The results obtained from this study are useful for designing fibrous insulation materials.