A centered hot plate method for measurement of thermal properties of thin insulating materials

This paper presents a method dedicated to thermal conductivity measurement of thin (a few millimeters thickness) insulating and super-insulating materials. The method is based on the measurement of the temperature at the center of a heating element inserted between two samples, with the unheated surface of the samples maintained constant. A 3D model of the heat transfer in the system has been established and simulated to determine the validity conditions of a 1D model to represent the center temperature. This 1D model was then used to realize a sensitivity analysis of the center temperature to the different parameters. The conclusion is that the thermal conductivity may be estimated with a good precision for all insulating materials from a simple steady state measurement and that the thermal capacity may also be estimated from transient recording of the temperature with a precision increasing with the value of the thermal capacity of the samples. It has then been shown that a device with two samples of different thickness improves the precision of the estimation of the thermal capacity. These conclusions are validated by an experimental study on polyethylene foam and PVC samples leading to an estimation of their thermal properties very close to the values measured by other classical methods (deviation < 5%).