The design of any heating process is based on a careful thermal management of heat transfer. A necessary prerequisite for this thermal management is the precise knowledge of thermal material properties. Need for improvements exist especially at high temperatures, where measurements of quantities like thermal conductivity or specific heat are difficult.
The exact knowledge of the material properties of refractories in the region of their, usual very high, application temperatures is the key to their successful application as well as to the development of new refractory materials. A particularly important question is the behaviour of a refractory against thermal shock and thermal cycling. While many techniques and standards deal with changes between high temperature and room temperature, the more realistic load is often the fast change between two high temperatures.