Porosity, Specific Surface Area and Effective Thermal Conductivity of Anisotropic Open Cell Lattice Structures

Open-cell box-lattice structures consisting of mutually orthogonal thermally conductive cylindrical ligaments can be configured to have wide ranging porosity, a large specific surface area and effective thermal conductivity in a particular direction together with specified structural characteristics. Thermal and mechanical properties can be tuned (and anisotropy introduced) by specification of different filament diameter and pitch for the vertical and horizontal filaments. Analytical models for porosity, specific surface area and effective thermal conductivity of lattice structures having different ligament diameters and pitches (anisotropy) are developed. The models show that all three of these quantities are functions of three dimensionless lengths.   This paper was also originally published as part of the Proceedings of the ASME 2005 Heat Transfer Summer Conference.