Thermal diffusivity and Biot number: a new experimental method

A new simple method is presented for measuring thermal diffusivity and Biot number in cylindrical samples made of relatively highly conducting materials, subjected to laminar air flow. The basic idea is a heat source in the middle section of the sample, acting also as a thermocouple; only one additional temperature sensor at the cylinder basis is required to give all information, without requiring any hypothesis about the effective time dependence of the heat source

Hot-Wire Method for Kinematic Viscosity Estimation

This paper explores the characterization of thermal and momentum diffusion properties of condensed phase biological fluids. The widely used transient hot-wire technique for determination of thermal diffusion properties is proposed here to investigate also the apparent kinematic viscosity of fluids with the apparatus commonly adopted for thermal conductivity and/or thermal diffusivity determination. The undesired onset of convection in the determination of thermal diffusion properties is in this case the useful effect measured at the wire-fluid interface. From a theoretical point of view, the onset of convection time at a given vertical position along the wire has been related to the Prandtl number, and the reliability of the kinematic viscosity has been studied and preliminarily tested in the case of wate