There are several models for the effective thermal conductivity of two-phase composite materials in terms of the conductivity of the solid and the disperse material. In this paper, we generalise three models of Maxwell type (namely, the classical Maxwell model and two generalisations of it obtained from effective medium theory and differential effective medium theory) so that the resulting effective thermal conductivity accounts for radiative heat transfer within gas voids. In the high-temperature regime, radiative transfer within voids strongly influences the thermal conductivity of the bulk material. Indeed, the utility of these models over classical Maxwell-type models is seen in the high-temperature regime, where they predict that the effective thermal conductivity of the composite material levels off to a constant value (as a function of temperature) at very high temperatures, provided that the material is not too porous, in agreement with experiments. This behaviour is in contrast to models which neglect radiative transfer within the pores, or lumped parameter models, as such models do not resolve the radiative transfer independently from other physical phenomena. Our results may be of particular use for industrial and scientific applications involving heat transfer within porous composite materials taking place in the high-temperature regime.
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