Teaching thermal wave physics with soils

In this paper, we discuss the features of a possible student experiment related to the conduction of heat in soils excited by a natural periodically time dependent source, namely the daily periodical oscillations in the earth's temperature, which can be denoted as thermal waves. A measuring device was designed and constructed for automatic measurements of the daily time air temperature variations as well as of the daily time temperature variations, at different depths beneath the soil's surface. Measurements were performed using LM-335 solid state temperature sensors incorporated into a computer-controlled probe. The data acquisition software was developed using a programming environment LabVIEW from National Instruments. In order to obtain characteristic parameters governing the physical phenomena involved, the results of our measurements were fitted to a thermal wave like solution of the heat diffusion equation in the presence of periodical heat sources. The phase shift as well as the attenuation of the temperature waves with depth was demonstrated, as well as their dependence on soil thermal properties, in particular its thermal diffusivity.