Heat transfer through a honeycomb sandwich panel

Progress brought about by human ingenuity and technological developments has been always accompanied by fresh problems, the successful solution of which enables still further progress. The recent developments in space exploration and exploitations are astounding. The coming years are likely to bring forth many remarkable achievements. Except for several engineering problems encountered with these developments the pace of progress is to study the heat transfer from honeycomb sandwich panels as an outer skin of high performance flight vehicles. The quantity of heat transferred through the panel is important in study of such vehicles, and methods or equations for determining this quantity are required. Usually, the thermal resistance of the panel is experimentally determined by measuring the amount of heat transmitted through the panel in a steady-state condition with fixed face temperatures. The use of these experimental results however, is largely limited to the panels identical to those tested and in the same temperature range as the test temperatures. Since it is impractical to obtain extensive test data of all honeycomb core sandwiches of interest, it is desirable to have some method of analysis for this. In the present investigation the equations are modified to permit the calculation of the steady-state temperature distribution duo to simultaneous conduction and radiation through honeycomb core sandwiches with given face temperatures. These equations can be solved for a range of face temperatures of interest. --Introduction, pages 1-2