697.133With the aim of developing a new methodology of thermal investigations of heat-insulating structures and materials, the features of quasi-stationary heat conduction in a flat wall under varying ambient conditions have been considered. The quasi-stationary approximation errors and the applicability criteria of stationary relations between the thermal parameters of the medium imposing restrictions on the rate of change in boundary temperatures have been determined. The possibility of using nonstationary states and stable conditions in thermal diagnostics of exterior walls has been shown.
Keywords: heat conduction in a flat wall, variable boundary conditions, stationary relations, thermal parameters, thermal diagnostics.Introduction. Questions on the stationarity and quasi-stationarity of the medium characteristics inevitably arise in analyzing any processes proceeding in it. The most striking example is provided by the transient plasma kinetics, within the framework of which a whole system of quasi-stationary criteria for internal parameters of the plasma was developed [1]; it is based on comparing the characteristic times of relaxation of these parameters as a consequence of various atomic and molecular processes. As a result, even in short-lived plasma formations, quasi-stationary states in which the time derivatives can be neglected are revealed [2,3].In the present work, a similar approach is extended to thermal processes having their own features of going to the quasi-stationary regime.Thermal processes, as opposed to elementary processes and plasma-chemical reactions, are always spatially oriented carrying heat flows in a certain direction. Therefore, they are anisotropic and nonequilibrium even in a homogeneous medium. The dependence of coordinates and boundary parameters is a specific feature of their stationarity (and quasi-stationarity) conditions, which we will consider here as applied to the one-dimensional heat-conduction problem for a flat wall with constant thermal characteristics of the material and variable boundary parameters.Our aim is to apply the concept of quasi-stationarity to the usual thermal processes, obtain analytical expressions for the conditions of quasi-stationary heat conduction and quasi-stationary approximation error, and investigate them. This will form the basis for developing the new quasi-stationary methodology (proposed by us in [4]) of controlling the thermal parameters of various kinds of heat-insulating structures and materials, including enclosure exterior walls and buildings [5,6], as well as objects of the aircraft and space-rocket industries [7], power engineering [8], and a number of other industries (for more details concerning the problems of thermal diagnostics see [4][5][6][7][8] and the references therein).The need for a quasi-stationary methodology, which arose in thermal diagnostics of objects located in the open atmosphere, is mainly due to the unattainability of long-time constancy of heat transfer because of the ever changing boundary conditions. But ...