Some elements in specific heat capacity measurement and numerical simulation of temperature modulated DSC (TMDSC) with R/C network

One important application of temperature modulated DSC (TMDSC) is the measurement of specific heat of materials. In this paper, a thermal resistance/capacitance (R/C) numerical model is used to analyze the effects of experimental parameters and calibration on the measurement of specific heat in TMDSC under isothermal conditions. The actual TMDSC experiments were conducted with sapphire and pure copper samples, respectively. Both simulation and experiments showed that in TMDSC, the measured sample specific heat is a non-linear function of many factors such as sample mass, the heat transfer properties of the TMDSC instrument, temperature modulation period, the heat capacity difference between calibration material and the test material, but modulation amplitude has very little effect on the results. The typical behavior of a heat flux type TMDSC can be described as a low pass filter in terms of specific heat capacity measurement when the instrument heat transfer properties are taken into account. At least for metallic materials, where the temperature gradient inside the sample can normally be ignored, the sample should be chosen in such a way that its total heat capacity (mass times specific heat) is close to that of the calibration material in order to get a more accurate result. Also, a large modulation period is beneficial to improving the test accuracy.