Joint experimental/computational techniques to measure thermal properties of solids

Experimental techniques to measure the thermal properties of solids are discussed. Experimental measurements and parameter estimation techniques are used to estimate the thermal properties. The importance of experimental design is emphasized, and criteria that give insight to the parameter estimation process and experiment are cited. A code-to-code communication technique is presented, which allows standard stand-alone direct solution programs to be linked with parameter estimation codes without modification. This method is called reusable interlace technology (RIT). Aspects of this computational technique are discussed. The experimental/computational techniques are demonstrated with an experiment to estimate the thermal properties of an orthotropic carbon-carbon composite material. Two-dimensional, transient temperature and heat flux data are used to estimate two components of thermal conductivity (in the principal directions of the material) and the volumetric heat capacity.