A "2-omega" technique for measuring anisotropy of thermal conductivity

A popular method of measuring the thermal conductivity of thin films and substrates, the "3-omega" method, is modified to yield a new technique for measuring the anisotropy in thermal transport in bulk materials. The validity of the proposed technique is established by measuring the thermal conductivity of strontium titanate, which is expected to be isotropic because of its cubic unit cell. The technique is then applied to rutile TiO(2). The analysis of experimental results on (100) and (001) TiO(2) reveals that the anisotropy is a function of the crystalline quality, as quantified by the effective thermal conductivity obtained through conventional "3-omega" measurements. The advantages of the proposed technique are similar to those of the standard "3-omega" method, namely the simplicity of sample preparation and measurement, and negligible errors due to radiation because of the small volume of material being heated. For anisotropy determination, the proposed technique has the additional advantage that a single sample is sufficient to determine both components of the thermal conductivity, namely the values in and perpendicular to the plane of cleavage. This is significant for materials in which there is a large variation in the crystalline quality from sample to sample. For such materials, it is unreliable to use two different samples, one for measuring the thermal conductivity in each direction. Experimental data are analyzed using a 3D Fourier-series based method developed in this work. The proposed method determines each component of the thermal conductivity with an estimated accuracy of about 10%.