| Abstract: | Thermal properties are very important for understanding and optimizing the nature of heat flow in engineering systems. As these measurements can be done with commercially available equipment, it is desirable to build an instrument in-house to measure thermal conductivity, to provide design and operational flexibility. We designed an in-house instrument based on heat transfer concepts and what can be understood from the commercially built, FOX 50. The instrument's goal is to find the steady state of a specimen when placed between two temperature regulated plates: one cooled and one heated. When the heat flux of the material is constant over a specified time the system is considered to have reached steady state. Calculations to solve thermal conductivity can be done with equations resulting from the two-thickness method, which involves measuring the same material twice, but at varying thicknesses. This instrument will have the ability to find the effective thermal conductivity of a specimen without a multitude of restrictions on the specimen's dimensions. |