Ceramic fiber products form a class of excellent refractory insulation materials. The increasing usage of fibrous materials has given further impetus for research into their heat transfer characteristics. In order to obtain more accurate estimations of effective thermal conductivity, this paper proposes a numerical model with a random structure to estimate the effective thermal conductivity of ceramic fiberboard under various bulk densities and temperatures. The present model is able to sort out individual contributions of conduction and radiation heat transfer mechanisms in these materials. The numerical simulation results are in good agreement with measured values obtained by a guarded hot plate (GHP) apparatus, indicating that the adopted modeling approach can be extended to other insulation systems.
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