An experimental investigation of dislocation‐phonon scattering in some copper alloys

The thermal conductivities of polycrystalline copper alloys, containing 2.8, and 12 at% aluminium and 30 at% zinc, have been measured between 1.5 and 4.2 °K in the annealed state and after tensile deformations up to 12%. Measurements of the dislocation densities in the alloys were made by transmission electron microscopy. It has been found that the scattering power of phonons by unit dislocation density increases linearly with the atomic concentration of aluminium. It would appear that the effect of zinc additions is negligible and that changes in the arrangements of the dislocations does not affect the effective scattering power.