Measurement Techniques for Thermal Conductivity and Interfacial Thermal Conductance of Bulk and Thin Film Materials

TL;DR

This paper reviews various measurement techniques for thermal conductivity and interfacial thermal conductance in bulk and thin film materials, emphasizing their principles, applications, and error considerations.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the most commonly used methods for thermal property measurement, guiding proper technique selection based on sample characteristics.

Findings

Steady-state, laser flash, and transient plane source are key methods for bulk materials.

3ω and thermoreflectance techniques are widely used for thin films.

Achieving less than 5% error in measurements is challenging but critical.

Abstract

Thermal conductivity and interfacial thermal conductance play crucial roles in the design of engineering systems where temperature and thermal stress are of concerns. To date, a variety of measurement techniques are available for both bulk and thin film solid-state materials with a broad temperature range. For thermal characterization of bulk material, the steady-state absolute method, laser flash diffusivity method, and transient plane source method are most used. For thin film measurement, the 3{\omega} method and transient thermoreflectance technique including both frequency-domain and time-domain analysis are employed widely. This work reviews several most commonly used measurement techniques. In general, it is a very challenging task to determine thermal conductivity and interface contact resistance with less than 5% error. Selecting a specific measurement technique to characterize thermal properties need to be based on: 1) knowledge on the sample whose thermophysical properties is to be determined, including the sample geometry and size, and preparation method; 2) understanding of fundamentals and procedures of the testing technique and equipment, for example, some techniques are limited to samples with specific geometrics and some are limited to specific range of thermophysical properties; 3) understanding of the potential error sources which might affect the final results, for example, the convection and radiation heat losses.