A new transient hot-wire instrument for measuring the thermal conductivity of electrically conducting and highly corrosive liquids using small samples

The transient hot-wire technique is widely used for measurements of the thermal conductivity of most fluids. However, for some particular liquids such as concentrated nitric acid solutions or similar nitric mixtures, for which the thermal properties are important for industrial or security applications, this technique can be difficult to use, which is essentially due to incompatibility between measurement probe materials and highly electrically conducting and corrosive liquids. Moreover, the possible highly energetic (explosive) character of these liquids requires minimum volume liquid samples, and safety measurement devices and processes. It is the purpose of this paper to report on a new patented instrument, based on tantalum short-hot-wire probe technology, which responds to the above requirements and allows safe automated thermal-conductivity measurements of concentrated acid nitric solutions and similar nitric mixtures for liquid samples less than 2 cm(3), with uncertainties better than 5%.