How can I measure the thermal conductivity of very thin grease samples?
When testing very thin samples, the influence of the bulk material conductivity is minimized whereas the influence of the surface contact resistance and specifics of the contact surfaces is maximized. In the extreme case where the sample thickness approaches zero, the contact resistance totally dominates the resulting test data. As such, microscopic surface characteristics can control the end result without being explicitly known thus giving the data an unpredictable scatter.
