Heat Transfer through Porous Media in Static Superfluid Helium.

Heat transfer through porous media in static saturated superfluid helium is investigated for porous media with different thickness, porosity and pore size. For large pore diameter, data are analyzed with the tortuosity concept in the pure Gorter-Mellink regime. It is shown that the tortuosity is constant over the temperature range investigated. For smaller pore diameter, the analysis reveals that the permeability is temperature-dependent in the Landau regime. In the intermediate regime, a model, including Landau and Gorter-Mellink regime, predicts a constant tortuosity within 10% but falls short predicting correctly the experimental data over the entire range of temperature. © 2006 American Institute of Physics [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]