  Materials with complex inner structure can be challenging to characterize in
an effective way. First, it is difficult to determine the representative volume
for such a heterogeneous material. Second, the effective material parameters
significantly depend on the structure, and thus on the interface properties. In
the present paper, we focus on composite metal foams, and we attempt to
determine the effective thermal parameters. We use the heat pulse experiment to
study its transient thermal response. We observed deviation from Fourier's law,
and thus we propose an evaluation procedure for such experimental data using
the Guyer--Krumhansl heat equation. Furthermore, we studied the effective
parameters, the specific heat, mass density, thermal conductivity and thermal
diffusivity, and we propose a method for deducing a more reliable thermal
diffusivity and thermal conductivity based on the transient temperature
history.
