Prof. D. N. Singh

KALYAN C. MANTHENA

M.Tech.
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, India manthenakc@yahoo.com

EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES ON HEAT TRANSFER THROUGH GEOMATERIALS

Heat transfer studies are of great importance to various civil and electrical engineering projects. One of the most important properties of the soils which help in estimating migration of heat through the soil mass is its resistivity (electrical as well as thermal). Recent studies have demonstrated usefulness of a laboratory thermal probe in evaluating thermal resisitivity of various soils. Based on these studies, a relationship between soil thermal and electrical resistivity has been derived and it is believed that this would be of a great help to the practicing engineers. Utility of a geotechnical centrifuge in modeling various geo-environmental problems has been well established by the researchers, in the recent past. These studies highlight the concept of modeling a prototype under varying site-specific conditions. However, potential of the centrifuge in modeling (and simulating) heat migration through geomaterials has not been explored much, and needs a special attention. In this context, the first step would be to ascertain the thermal properties of geomaterials under accelerated environment. This indicates that scaling factors for heat input, heat flux, duration of the heat migration, temperature and thermal resisitivity must be developed. Attempts have been made in the present study to verify the scaling factor for thermal resistivity. However, to show the validity of scaling factor for time, help of a finite element model (ANSYS) has been taken. The study reveals that conventional and centrifuge experiments can be used for validating different FEM based computer codes for modeling heat migration through the geomaterials.