New Apparatus for Characterizing Electrical Contact Resistance and Thermal Contact Conductance

A new apparatus for characterizing electrical contact resistance and thermal contact conductance has been developed and tested. The heating of the samples inside the apparatus was achieved via induction heating of a stainless steel billet to create a powerful heat generator instead of the commonly used convection furnace. With this equipment, the thermo-electro-mechanical (TEM) behavior of metal-carbon and metal-metal interfaces can be reproduced using a controlled inert gas environment, temperature up to 1000°C and mechanical pressure up to 2 MPa. A major advantage of this new concept is that the temperature equilibrium of the samples can be reached quickly (within two or three hours) while precisely controlling the heat flux. Recent experimental results performed on steel-carbon samples show that this concept is feasible and very efficient. This apparatus will be used to establish the constitutive laws of interfaces for electrical contact resistance and thermal contact conductance in the electrode connections to support numerical modeling of the aluminium reduction cell.