Abstract
The determination of the thermal conductivities of liquids may be accomplished through the use of a variation of the transient hot-wire technique, 1 in which a Mach-Zehnder interferometer is employed to measure the change in temperature of a short length of conductively coated optical fiber.2 This segment of fiber, which forms part of one arm of the interferometer and is immersed in the liquid of interest, is heated resistively by passing current through the conductive coating. The increase in the fiber temperature, which depends upon the thermal conductivity of the surrounding liquid, results in both a change in the refractive index of the fiber core and an axial strain in the fiber and is observed as a shifting of the interference pattern at the output of the interferometer. This shifting of the interference fringes may be directly correlated to the temperature change, and the thermal conductivity determined from the rate of change of the temperature.
© 1988 Optical Society of America
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