Abstract
The literature contains many analyses of thermal conductivity data made using Callaway's model, which has been successfully applied to a system where the form of the relaxation time was known with some certainty. For the case where neither the exact form nor the magnitude of the total relaxation time is known, a 'trial and error' approach has been previously employed to find the best form of total relaxation time to fit the data. This method is at worst not objective and at best laborious. A computer program is described in this paper which, using a gradient technique, is able to find automatically the best parameters for a given form of total relaxation time and to provide statistical information on the 'goodness of fit'. The program is applied to some thermal conductivity data which had been previously analysed by the 'trial and error' techniques and the results of the two analyses are compared. Used with care, it is thought that this technique should be a useful tool for thermal conductivity data analysis.

This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit: