Use of Different Furnaces to Study Repeatability and Reproducibility of Three Pd-C Cells

Three different Pd-C eutectic fixed-point cells were prepared and investigated at INRIM. Several tens of phase transition runs were carried out and recorded with both a Si-based radiation thermometer at 950 nm and a precision InGaAs-based thermometer at 1.6 μm. Two of the cells were of the same design with an inner volume of 12 cm3. The third one was smaller with a useful inner volume of 3.6 cm3. The three cells were filled with palladium powder 4N5 or 4N8 pure and graphite powder 6N pure. The repeatability and stability of the inflection point were investigated over a period of 1 year. The noticeably different external dimensions of the two cells, namely, 110 mm and 40 mm in length, allowed the influence of the longitudinal temperature distribution to be investigated. For this purpose, two different furnaces, a single-zone with SiC heaters and a three-zone with MoSi2 heaters, were used. Different operative conditions, namely, temperature steps, melting rate, longitudinal temperature distributions, and position of cells within the furnace, were tested to investigate the reproducibility of the cells. Effects on the duration and shape of the plateaux were also studied. This article gives details of the measurement setup and analyses of the melting plateaux obtained with the different conditions.