A Review and Evaluation of Predictive Models for Thermal Conductivity of Sands at Full Water Content Range

Jiaming Wang, Hailong He, Miles Dyck and Jialong Lv
Additional contact information
Jiaming Wang: College of Natural Resources and Environment, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China
Hailong He: College of Natural Resources and Environment, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China
Miles Dyck: Department of Renewable Resources, University of Alberta, Edmonton T6G2H1, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E3, Canada
Jialong Lv: College of Natural Resources and Environment, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China

Energies, 2020, vol. 13, issue 5, 1-15

Abstract: The effective thermal conductivity ( λ eff ) of sands is a critical parameter required by applications in geothermal energy resources, geo-technique and geo-environment and in science disciplines. However, the availability of the reliable λ eff data is not sufficient and predictive models are usually used in practice to estimate λ eff . These predictive models may vary in complexity, flexibility, accuracy and applications. There is no universal model that can be applied to all soil types and full water content range. The choice of different models may result in distinctive estimates of λ eff . The objectives of this study were to conduct an extensive review of the thermal conductivity models of sands and evaluate their performance with a large dataset consisting of various sand types from dry to saturation. A total of 14 models to predict λ eff of sands were evaluated with a large compiled dataset consisting of 1025 measurements on 62 sands from 20 studies. The results show that the models of Chen 2008 (CS2008) and Zhang et al. 2016 (ZN2016) give the best estimates of thermal conductivity of sands, with Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency = 0.9 and RMSE = 0.3 W m −1 °C −1 . These two models are potentially applied to accurately estimate thermal conductivity of sands of different types.

Keywords: soil thermal conductivity models; sands; model evaluation; transient heat pulse method (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/5/1083/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/5/1083/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:13:y:2020:i:5:p:1083-:d:326936

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().