Measurement of the thermal conductivity of cortical bone by an inverse technique Original Research Article

Experimental values for the thermal conductivity of cortical bone tissue vary widely in the literature. The possible sources for this variability are numerous and include differences in species, wet or dry conditions, direction of heat flow, and experimental method and protocol. In addition, almost all of these studies use methods that were developed for testing high-conductivity materials. The purpose of the present work is to develop and demonstrate a measurement technique more suitable to the relatively low thermal conductivities of cortical bone. A guarded hot plate apparatus is employed, but the small specimen size requires application of an inverse technique to extract thermal conductivity values. Composite test specimens consisting of a known reference material and bone are measured, and the resulting effective thermal conductivity is compared to a numerical solution of the experimental problem. Results for equine cortical bone indicate values of the thermal conductivity of 0.80 W/(m K) for saturated specimens and 0.70 W/(m K) for dry test specimens.