SPHERE PACKING ALGORITHM FOR HEAT TRANSFER STUDIES

Abstract

Sintering is an important process for most ceramic systems and optical fibers. Many of the defects, introduced at the sintering stage, are formed because of the thermal processes. As such, there has been significant interest in modeling the underlying thermal processes. However, because of the complexities involved, most of the existing analyses tended to utilize a porous medium assumption whereby the temperature is computed through some average thermal properties that are in turn related to the porosity of the structure. The assumption is that the porosity can describe uniquely the property of the structure. This has never been directly confirmed, as most of the existing packing algorithms cannot achieve sufficient microstructural control. In the present work, an algorithm is introduced to enable a greater degree of control on the microstructure of the packing (mean coordination number and mean contact area). The subsequent thermal analysis confirmed that packings with the same porosity could have different thermal conductivity values.