Abstract: Mass, momentum and energy transfer in the internal structure of porous media are basic processes of life, natural phenomena and production. Questions about heat transfer in porous media involve many fields of science, which have aroused researcher's wide attention and they also have done a lot of works on this. Effective thermal conductivity method is to view porous media as a continuous medium. The actual solid skeleton and all kinds of heat transfer model in porous media (heat conduction, convection and radiation) can be converted into an integrated heat conduction problem. It has already become the most commonly used approach in the porous medium heat transfer issue. Recent years, the bubble type porous medium (such as the metal foam, ceramic foam or graphite foam) has attracted widespread attention. Researches on the effective thermal conductivity (ETC) of bubble type porous media are reviewed in this article. Three kinds of research methods are introduced, including experimental testing, theoretical derivation and numerical simulation. Finally, the problems existing in the research of effective thermal conductivity are discussed. Experimental testing method does have high accuracy but it is difficult to determine the contribution of each heat transfer model to the ETC and the cost of the testing is high. Although theoretical derivation method has clear physical meaning and wide applicability, the results have larger deviation and some resulting correlations include coefficient based on experience or experimental data. The results of the numerical simulation are close to the experimental data but the complexity lies in the model construction.

Key words: effective thermal conductivity, bubble type porous medium, review