Method for simultaneous determination of thermal properties

What is it about?

Heat capacity, thermal diffusivity, and thermal conductivity are important thermal properties to understand the nature of materials. To determine the three thermal properties, many experimental techniques and apparatus have been developed. However, most of them are dedicated to the measurement of specific thermal properties. In this article, we proposed an improved method to simultaneously determine these thermal properties and demonstrated the method on synthetic quartz and poly(methyl methacrylate) plates in the temperature range of 80–300 K.

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Photo by Max Nüstedt on Unsplash

Photo by Max Nüstedt on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The three aforementioned thermal properties usually depend on temperature, and the values may exhibit sample dependence in scenarios where impurities are present. Therefore, it would be significant for detail discussion that these thermal properties can be determined simultaneously and with the same sample. In the proposed method, the heat of a square wave with a superimposed constant component is applied to one side of a plate-shaped sample using a heater, which is thermally linked to a heat reservoir. The response temperature is measured by a thermometer attached to the heater. This configuration is advantageous for determining the thermal properties with low-heat modulation. Additionally, it is easy to obtain the temperature dependences of them by controlling the heat of the constant component.

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