Effective lateral thermal conductivity of square-cell cores

The effective thermal conductivity of square-cell cores has been formulated for heat flow lateral to the principal axes of the cells. The formulation is based on a thermal model involving linearized radiation and solid conduction only, where the application is for cored mirrors in space-based optical systems. The formulation uses an effective view-factor correlation that allows a radiative conductance to be isolated as a component acting in parallel with a solid conductance. By analysis for both normal and diagonal global heat flow, relative to the cell pattern, sensitivity of effective thermal conductivity to lateral heat-flow orientation was found to be quite negligible.