Grant: Engage Grants Program

Instruments for thermal characterizations of materials are used in many industrial and scientific laboratories. C-Therm Technologies has commercialized a heat sensor that measures thermal conductivity in materials. The product is used around the world to measure, among other applications, granular uniformity in pharmaceutical mixtures. The company is now looking at diversifying its products and developping an instrument to measure thermal expansion of materials. Along with thermal conductivity, thermal expansion is the most common type of thermal measurement. The proposed instrument will use some of the best displacement sensing technologies to achieve the most accurate results yet in commercial instruments. The goal is a displacement resolution of 0.1 micron (0.0001 mm) and working environment temperatures ranging from -150 to 2000 oC. Unlike thermal expansion instruments that use push rods to measure displacements, the optical sensors in this instrument are located outside the heated chamber and measure change in the sample surface remotely, i.e. from a distance of ~10 cm. With sensors located in a controlled, regulated environment, greater accuracy and consistency is anticipated. Professor Alain Haché of the Photonics Laboratory at the UdeM will carry out the preliminary testings and experiments to determine the feasibility of the proposed instrument. His expertise in the area of optics and heat, the research personnel and research facility is ideal for this project.