A Novel Structure and Experimental Procedure for Nanocalorimetry

Calorimetry is the process of quantifying internal energy changes as a result of temperature changes, in which enthalpy is a measure of the internal energy. Differential calorimetry has been around for about half a century and has been primarily adopted to eliminate the unknown sources of heat losses from the “test” structure by introducing a “reference” structure, e.g. [1]. Over the past decade, the need for small-scale measurements have led to the development of MEMS based differential calorimetry techniques, e.g. [2], which is an ideal platform to satisfy the requirements for fabrication of identical “reference” and “test” structures. However, one should be cautious that the “identical” geometry and dimension are only the required but not necessarily the sufficient condition, in this approach. Indeed, the necessary and sufficient condition to achieve the highest resolution and accuracy is for the “test” and “reference” structures to have identical thermal “footprint” and “behavior”.