Fabrication of photoacoustic cell and thermal diffusivity measurement of coal carbon black using it

Abstract

Photoacoustic spectroscopy (PAS) is an important technique for the characterization of materials by measuring heat generation in the sample. The photoacoustic (PA) signal detection is rather difficult due to the weaker signal intensity and unavailability of sensitive detectors of acoustic waves. In this work, authors have fabricated a photoacoustic cell and made parametric studies to get the maximum signal. For the optimum signal, the volume of acoustic cell cavity was found to 9.42 × 10−7 m3. After the optimization, thermal diffusivity of coal Carbon black was measured and it was found to be 2.206 × 10−4 m2/s which is very close to the standard diffusivity value of coal carbon.