Abstract
This paper deals with the optimal experiment design and the measurement of the effective thermal properties of a porous medium using the transient hot-wire technique. The differential equations governing the combined conduction and free convection heat transfer in a gray porous medium are solved numerically using the finite volume method. The experiment design is performed using different optimality criteria and the measurements are reported on a sand sample constituted of spherical particles. The parameter estimation is performed by the minimization of the ordinary least-squares objective function comparing the measured temperatures to the response of a thermal model depending on the unknown thermophysical parameters. The used iterative algorithm is based on the Levenberg-Marquardt method.