Single-Sided Testing (Add‑on)

Rapid production line QC testing

The Single-Sided Testing Measurement Module has been developed to enable single-sided, instead of double-sided, sample testing of Thermal Conductivity, Thermal Diffusivity, Thermal Effusivity, and Specific Heat Capacity using our Hot Disk® or Hot Strip® sensors. This simplifies the testing as it requires less sample amount and preparation and gives more flexibility in the sample to sensor clamping.

Applying our single-sided sample testing, the Hot Disk® or Hot Strip® sensor and a thermal insulating background support are placed on the surface of a single sample piece or component. The thermal insulating background support is typically a centimeter-thick piece of expanded polystyrene foam. Next, the same transient temperature reading is performed as for our standard double-sided testing, except that the heat pulse is used with 50% lower power.

Our single-sided sample testing shows excellent reproducibility and repeatability in the results compared to our standard double-sided sample testing. This makes it possible to perform rapid QC testing of high precision at production lines, make quick comparative sample studies, and test limited amounts of samples.

It should be noted that our single-sided testing exhibits slightly lower accuracy in the results than our standard double-sided testing. This ensues from the necessarily asymmetric heat flow around the sensor during the transient temperature reading. As a result of this and using a non-ideal thermal insulating background support, the best results are acquired for high thermal conducting samples. In contrast, low thermal conducting samples (e.g., many polymers) only yield Thermal Effusivity.

Hot Disk AB’s co-founder first described this single-sided measurement procedure in 1983. His paper published in Review Scientific Instruments in 1983¹ outlines the general principle behind it.

1. S. E. Gustafsson et al., “Transient hot-strip probe for measuring thermal properties of insulating solids and liquids”, Rev. Sci. Instrum. 54, pp. 744-747 (1983).↩︎

 

Thermal Conductivity Range:

1. To achieve maximum accuracy a minimum of 1 W/m/K is required; however, reproducibility and Thermal Effusivity values will still be good down to 0.1 W/m/K.

Instruments	Range
TPS 3500, TPS 2500 S, TPS 2200, TPS 1000	0.11 to 500 W/m/K
TPS 1500	0.11 to 400 W/m/K
TPS 500 S	0.11 to 200 W/m/K
TPS 500	0.11 to 100 W/m/K
Hot Disk M1	0.11 to 40 W/m/K