Realization of thermal inertia in frequency domain

Abstract

To realize the lagging behavior in heat conduction observed in these two decades, this paper firstly theoretically excludes the possibility that the underlying thermal inertia is a result of the time delay in heat diffusion. Instead, we verify in experiments the electro-thermal analogy, wherein the thermal inertial is parameterized by thermal inductance that formulates hyperbolic heat-conduction. The thermal hyperbolicity exhibits a special frequency response in Bode plot, wherein the amplitude ratios is kept flat after crossing some certain frequency, as opposed to Fourier heat-conduction. We apply this specialty to design an instrument that reliably identifies thermal inductances of some materials in frequency domain. The instrument is embedded with a DSP-based frequency synthesizer capable of modulating frequencies in utmost high-resolution. Thermal inertia implies a new possibility for energy storage in analogy to inductive energy storage in electricity or mechanics. © 2014 by the authors.