Contact Resistance

The concept of thermal resistance can be utilised to solve steady state heat transfer problems that involve series, parallel or combined series-parallel components. This article demonstrates how to calculate the total thermal resistance for such systems and how to calculate the thermal resistance for practical geometries such as a pipe wall.

Thermal contact conductance is required to evaluate heat transfer through the interface of two materials and is dependent on a range of material and interface properties. This article provides a brief summary of these properties and a list of thermal contact conductance for a selection of metal-metal pairs.