Ithaca College

Matt Sullivan, Bruce Thompson, and former student Alex Williamson '05 have published a paper entitled "An Experiment on the Dynamics of Thermal Diffusion" in the July 2008 issue of the American Journal of Physics. The paper describes a unique experiment suitable for advanced undergraduate physics students, which determines the thermal properties of a substance using a thermal pulse technique.

The paper presents a laboratory apparatus and experiment that demonstrate thermal diffusion in metals via a dynamic measurement of the temperature in a metal rod as a function of position and time. From this one measurement, using simple heat flow equations, one can extract both the thermal conductivity and the heat capacity of the metal to within five percent of the accepted values.

This experiment can also be expanded for advanced students, who can fully model the heat flow by including alternate heat losses and finite heater models via a numerical solution of a partial differential equation. Online programs and data are available for use by interested instructors.