Recommended Improvements

There were a few problems which plagued the entirety of this experiment that should be discussed so they can be improved upon for future tests. First, in our experiment the heat source was fairly large, a full ¼ inch in diameter, and was held in place for 5 seconds before being removed. One of our assumptions in the derivation of equation 4 was that the initial thermal profile would take the shape of a delta function, but we found that often the thermal profile of the sample immediately after the heat source was removed decayed more linearly than as a gaussian, as shown below. To remedy this, we recommend future experimenters use a much hotter and smaller heat source and apply it for a much shorter time.

Another improvement to the process is simply to increase the amount of data processed per test and per sample. Given more time, the program written for this experiment could be modified to take as input the entire video generated by the thermal camera, which would increase the number of data points on the linear fits which determine the thermal diffusivity.

Furthermore, since the much greater contributor to the uncertainty in this process is variance between different tests on the same sample, running more tests per sample will improve the precision of this process. We only used three tests per sample due to time constraints, but would recommend more for future experiments.