Quartz-Fiber Thermal Insulation: Infrared Radiative Properties and Calculation of Radiative-Conductive Heat Transfer

Calculations of absorption, transport scattering, and radiation diffusion coefficients for a highly porous material of quartz fibers are performed by use of rigorous scattering theory for arbitrarily oriented cylinders. New results concerning resonance absorption in the semitransparency region and intensive “scattering by absorption” at refractive index n ≈ 1 in the opacity region are obtained. Numerical results for the radiation diffusion coefficient from a theoretical model without taking into account both dependent scattering and interference effects are in a good agreement with the experimental data for isotropic fibrous material of density 144 kg/m3. Calculations allow us to give practical proposals to simplify the determination of optical properties of poly disperse material with randomly oriented fibers. Some results on the radiative–conductive heat transfer in the material considered are presented. The radiation transfer is described in the P1 approximation. A two-band spectral model with bands corresponding to semitransparency and opacity regions is proposed. Applicability of a modified radiative conduction approximation both to transient and to steady-state calculations is discussed.