Investigating the thermal conductivity of materials by analyzing the temperature distribution in diamond anvils cell under high pressure

Abstract

Investigating the thermal transport properties of materials is of great importance in the field of earth science and for the development of materials under extremely high temperatures and pressures. However, it is an enormous challenge to characterize the thermal and physical properties of materials using the diamond anvil cell (DAC) platform. In the present study, a steady-state method is used with a DAC and a combination of thermocouple temperature measurement and numerical analysis is performed to calculate the thermal conductivity of the material. To this end, temperature distributions in the DAC under high pressure are analyzed. We propose a three-dimensional radiative–conductive coupled heat transfer model to simulate the temperature field in the main components of the DAC and calculate in situ thermal conductivity under high-temperature and high-pressure conditions. The proposed model is based on the finite volume method. The obtained results show that heat radiation has a great impact on the temperature field of the DAC, so that ignoring the radiation effect leads to large errors in calculating the heat transport properties of materials. Furthermore, the feasibility of studying the thermal conductivity of different materials is discussed through a numerical model combined with locally measured temperature in the DAC. This article is expected to become a reference for accurate measurement of in situ thermal conductivity in DACs at high-temperature and high-pressure conditions.