The continuous increase in the utilization of polymeric materials in many specific applications has demanded the detailed knowledge of their physical properties both during their processing as raw material, as well as in the overall range of the working temperature of the final polymer product. Nowadays mathematical modelling has become an established tool for improving process control and product quality in polymer processing. As models become more sophisticated, there is an increasing need for reliable thermo-physical properties data. Those properties are observed when heat is added or removed from a material, and they become important in any project that must function in any thermal environment. Sometimes, the high cost of reliable equipments for thermal measurements is the reason for which many industrial laboratories cannot afford to buy such equipments. In this work, a very simple and low cost arrangement, a variation of the well known split column method is employed in the experimental determination of the thermal conductivity of some selected polymers. Rectangular parallelepiped shaped samples, 20cmx10cmx2cm were prepared by cutting such pieces from long commercial plates or through the extrusion process starting from the powder or pellets of the solid polymer. The reproducibility is very good, and the results obtained were checked against results obtained by the hot wire technique, laser flash technique, and Angström method. Experimental results show a solid consistence among such techniques when they are checked against each other.
Keywords:
polymers, thermal conductivity, split column technique, steady state technique.
