Abstract
Describes the improvement of a simple thermal comparator for distinguishing between diamond and its common substitutes, by the incorporation of a resistive heater. Essentially, the heater raises the temperature of one junction of a copper-constantan thermocouple while the other junction is cooled by the material under test. This note describes measurements of the time response of the comparator and of the dependence of the output EMF upon the thermal conductivity of the test sample, together with some observations on the effect of specimen thickness. It is shown that the behaviour of the comparator fits a model that consists of a network of five thermal resistors.

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