Determination of Thermal Conductivities of Some Metal Materials and Clay

Abstract

This work was carried out to determine the thermal conductivities of some selected metals (copper, brass, steel and aluminium) using silver parameters as standard values to calculate for other four metals. Determination of thermal conductivity of metallic materials is very useful in many engineering applications including electronics, automobiles and civil engineering purposes. The apparatus used in this work include retort stand, metal rods of different materials, burner and thermometers. The thermal conductivity of local material (clay) was also determined after verifying that the method has worked for the materials of known thermal conductivities. This was done by calculating the heat supplied to silver metal rod with a known thermal conductivity of 428 W/m.K. By increasing the temperature at various heat supply (2.5 W, 4.0 W, 6.0 W and 8.0 W), corresponding thermal conductivities were calculated for each metal and the local material. The results showed that with the small range of quantity of heat used in this work (2.5 – 8.0 W), Brass, Copper and Clay showed a linear increase in thermal conductivity as the quantity of heat increases, while Aluminium and Steel showed a linear decrease in value of thermal conductivity. Also, the thermal conductivity of the local clay was determined to be 9.38w/mK.