Emittance Measurements at the Langley Chemical Physics Laboratory

Total hemispherical emittance measurements are made routinely for materials which may be heated by electrical resistance methods over the temperature range of 600 degrees to 2,000 F by using a black-body reference method. This employs a conical black body and a thermopile detector with a calcium fluoride lens. Emittance is obtained by measuring the radiant flux from the specimen strip and comparing it with the flux from an equal area of the black-body cone at the same temperature. The temperature measurements are made by use of thermocouples. It is planned to extend the temperature range of this type of measurement to temperatures above 2,000 F. Another technique has been investigated for measuring emittance of materials not amenable to electrical heating or thermocouple attachment. This method uses a black-body-cavity furnace similar to that used in reference 5 to measure emittance of transparent materials such as glass. The method employs a heated black-body cavity in which the semicircular specimen is allowed to come to the equilibrium temperature of the cavity and then is rotated in front of a water-cooled viewing port where a sensitive thermistor detector alternately views the specimen surface and the black-body cavity. The ratio of the two readings gives the specimen emittance directly, for the temperature of the black body. The detector output is recorded on a fast Brown self-balancing potentiometer. The furnace is provided with a water-cooled blackened shutter which may be inserted behind the specimen to eliminate any transmitted black-body radiation if the specimen is transparent. This apparatus is capable of measuring total normal emittance over the temperature range of 1,000 degrees to 2,000 F. Preliminary data for boron nitride specimens of two thicknesses are shown where total normal emittance is plotted against temperature for two experimental conditions: (1) black-body radiation incident on the back of the specimen and (2) no black-body radiation incident on the back of the specimen (that is, with a watercooled shutter behind the specimen). The data appear to indicate a slight transparency for the thin specimen and emittances of from 0.7 to 0.8 over the temperature range.