Thermal Conductivity of Argon at High Pressures and High Temperatures

Accurate data on the thermal conductivity of argon at high pressures and high temperatures is essential to unraveling the nature of the Earth’s interior. Argon is a common pressure-transmitting medium in diamond anvil cell (DAC) experiments, which is commonly used for studying the properties of minerals at pressures and temperatures native to the mantel and core. We used a transient heating technique (Beck et al., 2007) in a symmetric DAC up to 50 GPa and 2500 K. A thin iridium foil (1 μm thick) positioned in a recessed gasket hole filled with argon served as a heat absorber (coupler) to pump thermal energy into the sample. We used 6 μs width pulses from electronically modulated Yb-based fiber laser. We determined the temperature of the coupler with 500 ns time resolution by applying the Planck function to its thermal emission spectrum, and doing this over time yields temperature verses time for the coupler. Using finite element (FE) calculation methods we simulated the heat flux transfer in the DAC cavity using the experimentally determined geometric and laser heating parameters. The thermochemical parameters of Ir and Ar were determined by scaling the ambient pressure data using the available equations of state. The temperature dependent thermal conductivity of Ar was determined by fitting the results of FE calculations to the experimentally determined time dependent coupler temperature. We used the results of the theoretical calculations (Tretiakov & Scandolo, 2004) as the initial input. The results for the pressure and temperature dependent thermal conductivity of Ar will be reported at the meeting. This work is supported by NSF EAR 0711358, NSF-REU, Carnegie Institution of Washington, and DOE-NNSA (CDAC). Beck, P; Goncharov, A.F., Struzhkin, V.V., Militzer, B, Mao, H.K, Hemley, R.J. (2007). Measurement of thermal diffusivity at high pressure using a transient heating technique, Appl Phys. Lett. 91, 181914-(1-3). Tretiakov, K. V. & S. Scandolo (2004). Thermal conductivity of solid argon at high pressure and high temperature: A molecular dynamics study. J. Chem. Phys. 121, 11177-11182.