Heat capacity determination of metallic thin films using temperature profiles at room conditions: Theory

An analytical model for heat capacity determination based on energy conservation to obtain the heating/cooling temperature profiles of a film-substrate system is discussed. The proposed model integrates the heat transfer by convection and radiation on films to obtain the temperature profiles such that thermal properties can be obtained from these profiles at room conditions. We demonstrated that the resulting time constants of the analysis are the key parameters to obtain experimentally some thermal properties of the film/substrate system. The methodology and the theoretical results to estimate the heat capacity of gold (100 nm) on Kapton (0.125 mm) and on glass (0.5 mm) substrates are analyzed and reported. Simulations with experimental results reported for copper films by this methodology are in good agreement with our results.