Demonstration of Thermal Property Determination for a Suspended Wire Using 3ω Method Acquired by a High buffered Multimeter Applying a Discrete Fourier Transformation and a Window Function

Abstract

In this study, a technique to estimate the thermal properties of a suspended copper wire using the 3ω method was proposed and its operation was demonstrated. This approach used a digital multimeter with a large measurement buffer to implement a procedure in which an appropriate window function and a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) were applied. This significantly reduces the noise level to a few nV, especially in the lower-frequency regions (less than 1 Hz), even if a longer measurement time is required. The third-harmonic voltage signal containing the thermal properties information for the 3ω method was clearly observed with a high signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio, and the thermal conductivity and diffusivity were estimated from 60 K to 300 K from the current frequency dependence of the third-harmonic voltage. The thermal conductivities of the copper wire were determined to be 423.0 and 385.9 W/mK at 100 and 300 K, respectively. Specific heat was calculated from thermal conductivity and diffusivity, and the Debye temperature was estimated to be 346 K from the temperature dependence of the specific heat. These values were in good agreement with previous research. Measurement of thermal properties using a digital lock-in amplifier with identical configuration resulted in overestimation of thermal conductivity in entire temperature regions owing to a low S/N ratio throughout the analysis of the DFT. The technique based on DFT with a window function is therefore more reliable for detecting the third-harmonic voltage in the low-frequency region of less than 1 Hz because it obtains a high S/N ratio.