%0 Journal Article %A Znaidia, Sami %A Albouchi, Fethi %A Mzali, Foued %A Jemnia, Abdelmajid %A Nasrallah, Sassi Ben %D 2009 %I Begell House %N 6 %P 573-583 %R 10.1615/JPorMedia.v12.i6.70 %T Optimal Experiment Design and Measurement of the Effective Thermal Conductivity of a Porous Medium in the Presence of Free Convection %U https://www.dl.begellhouse.com/journals/49dcde6d4c0809db,2b903bc30fe3f1b4,3ddab72e7c333d26.html %V 12 %X This paper deals with the optimal experiment design and the measurement of the effective thermal properties of a porous medium using the transient hot-wire technique. The differential equations governing the combined conduction and free convection heat transfer in a gray porous medium are solved numerically using the finite volume method. The experiment design is performed using different optimality criteria and the measurements are reported on a sand sample constituted of spherical particles. The parameter estimation is performed by the minimization of the ordinary least-squares objective function comparing the measured temperatures to the response of a thermal model depending on the unknown thermophysical parameters. The used iterative algorithm is based on the Levenberg-Marquardt method. %8 2009-04-17