Editorial

Abstract

The special feature in this issue of Measurement Science and Technology has beenproduced to provide readers with an overview of recent progress in `Advanced Measurement Technology of Thermophysical Properties and Reference Materials for Solids'.The 13 papers and review article in this feature contain some of the topics reported from a Japanese national project entitled `Research on Measurement Technology and Reference Materials for Thermophysical Properties of Solids'. This project started in 1997 with a five-year term and involved more than ten participating laboratories and universities. The purpose of the project is to develop measurement technologies of thermophysical properties as an intellectual infrastructure for producing reliable data and for disseminating them effectively to the scientific and industrial communities. The project requires clarifying the uncertainty in measuring the thermophysical properties and the characteristics of solid materials in order to develop a reliable and traceable database. An invited review from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL, Teddington, UK) is included for the thermal conductivity measurement of insulators using the guarded hot plate method.The papers collected in this feature reflect the general trends in the research on thermophysical properties of solid materials. The properties discussed here are the density, thermal conductivity, thermal diffusivity, emissivity, specific heat capacity and thermal expansion coefficient. New measurement technologies for evaluating these thermophysical properties on bulk materials, thin films, functionally graded materials and surfaces at low and very high temperatures are featured.In addition to the new measurement technologies, the review article in this feature describes the importance of research from the viewpoint of data users, where a new database system supported by measurement and evaluation is discussed. This system consists of independent databases at data production and evaluation sites, and is integrated as a network database system for users.We hope that this special feature will stimulate new directions ofthe research in the thermophysical properties of solidmaterials, and will help to create more precise, reliable andconvenient methods for measuring thermophysical properties fordata producers and users.Thanks are addressed to all authors who contributed to thepublication of this special feature on Advanced Measurement Technology of Thermophysical Properties and Reference Materials for Solids, and also to Institute of Physics Publishing and their staff for the support and useful suggestions in collecting the papers.