Thermal Conductivity of Liquids

Abstract

At present it may be said that there is no satisfactory theory of the mechanism of thermal conduction in liquids, although it is recognized' that the mechanism of thermal conduction in liquids must be different from that in a gas. The mechanism of thermal conduction outlined here refers to the melting point and leads us to an expres-sion for the thermal conductivity of a liquid near the freezing point in terms of the melting point, molecular weight and molecular volume of the liquid. A liquid near its freezing point is here considered as an assemblage of a number of linear harmonic oscillators, each vibrating with a frequency v about a slowly displaced equi-librium position with an amplitude which is comparable with the mean molecular distance a. This simple picture of a liquid has yielded interesting results' about the properties of the liquid state of matter. In dealing with the problem of heat conduction we are concerned with the transport of thermal energy.