A new equation for the thermal conductivity of organic compounds

This work presents a wide literature survey of the available data of the experimental thermal conductivity data of organic liquids. The experimental data were collected for 136 compounds belonging to the following families: refrigerants, alkanes, alkenes, aromatics, cycloalkanes, cycloalkenes, ethers, esters, ketones, carboxylic acids, and alcohols. The experimental data were regressed with the most reliable semi-empirical correlating methods existing in the literature and a reliable set of 4,584 experimental data was finally selected. The influence of several physical parameters on the thermal conductivity calculation is discussed and a new equation to represent the thermal conductivity of organic liquids at atmospheric pressure for temperatures below normal boiling point and at saturation for temperatures above the normal boiling point is presented. To minimize the deviation between the predictions and the experimental data and to find the optimal coefficients for the proposed equation, a statistical analysis was performed. The resulting equation is simple and is able to predict the thermal conductivities with low deviations for the major part of the collected data for the studied families. © 2013 Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary.