Thermal diffusivity measurements on porous carbon fiber reinforced polymer tubes

This work presents the application of methods for the determination of the thermal diffusivity well suited for flat bodies adapted to cylindrical bodies. Green’s functions were used to get the temperature time history for small and large times, for the approach of intersecting these two straight lines. To verify the theoretical considerations noise free data are generated by finite element simulations. Furthermore effects of inhomogeneous excitation and the anisotropic heat conduction of carbon fiber reinforced polymers were taken into account in these numerical simulations. It could be shown that the intersection of the two straight lines is suitable for the determination of the thermal diffusivity, although the results have to be corrected depending on the ratio of the cylinders inner and outer radii. Inhomogeneous excitation affects the results of this approach as it lead to multidimensional heat flux. However, based on the numerical simulations a range of the azimuthal angle exists, where the thermal diffusivity is nearly independent of the angle. The method to determine the thermal diffusivity for curved geometries by the well suited Thermographic Signal Reconstruction method and taking into account deviations from the slab by a single correction factor has great advantages from an industrial point of view, just like an easy implementation into evaluation software and the Thermographic Signal Reconstruction methods rather short processing time.