New development of the metal volume thermal expansion

Abstract

Volume thermal expansion measurement of the solid is one of the most challenging issue in material industry especially when the solid is in big size. The existing instruments such as dilatometer has a limitation to determine the volume thermal expansion of material. Therefore, a new and precise system has been proposed to determine the volume thermal expansion. In this study, several samples such as gold and tungsten were used to determine its volume thermal expansion by using custom made hydrostatic weighing system (HWS) where the experimental results show that the HWS can determine the volume thermal expansion. Volume thermal expansion value for gold rod and tungsten rod are 1.5×10-4 °C-1 and 7.7×10-5 °C-1 respectively. The expanded uncertainty obtained using HWS was 0.0003 °C-1. To assure the quality of the HWS, inter-instrument comparison between HWS and dilatometer was performed. The results of the comparison show that the En ≤ 1 indicates the performance of the HWS is acceptable. Thus, this study will demonstrate on how the volume thermal expansion of the material is precisely and accurately measured using HWS. Furthermore, it is cheaper than dilatometer with reasonable accuracy and it was traceable to SI unit.