Measurements of thermophysical properties of solid and liquid NIST SRM 316L stainless steel

In this work, we perform high accuracy measurements of thermophysical properties for the National Institute of Standards and Technology standard reference material for 316L stainless steel. As these properties can be sensitive to small changes in elemental composition even within the allowed tolerances for an alloy class, by selecting a publicly available standard reference material for study our results are particularly useful for the validation of multiphysics models of industrial metal processes. An ohmic pulse-heating system was used to directly measure the electrical resistivity, enthalpy, density, and thermal expansion as functions of temperature. This apparatus applies high current pulses to heat wire-shaped samples from room temperature to metal vaporization. The great advantage of this particular pulse-heating apparatus is the very short experimental duration of 50 μs, which is faster than the collapse of the liquid wire due to gravitational forces, as well as that it prevents any chemical reactions of the hot liquid metal with its surroundings. Additionally, a differential scanning calorimeter was used to measure specific heat capacity from room temperature to around 1400 K. All data are accompanied by uncertainties according to the guide to the expression of uncertainty in measurement.