An experiment on the dynamics of thermal diffusion

Abstract

We present an experiment that demonstrates thermal diffusion in metals via a dynamic measurement of the temperature in a metal rod as a function of position and time. From this single measurement and using simple heat flow equations, we can extract the thermal conductivity and the specific heat of the metal to within 5% of the accepted values. This experiment can be extended for advanced students, who can model the heat flow by including heat losses and finite heater models via a numerical solution of a partial differential equation.