TABLE OF CONTENTS Differential scanning calorimetry, DSC, is a technique which combines the ease of measurement of heating and cooling curves as displayed in Fig. 4.9 with the quantitative features of calorimetry (see Sect. 4.2). Temperature is measured continuously, and a differential technique is used to assess the heat flow into the sample and to equalize incidental heat gains and losses between reference and sample. Calorimetry is never a direct determination of the heat content. Measuring heat is different from volume or mass determinations, for example. In the latter cases the total amount can be established with a single measurement. The heat content, in contrast, must be measured by beginning at zero kelvin where the heat content is zero, and add all heat increments up to the temperature of interest.
In Fig. 4.53, a brief look is taken at the history of the DSC. Both, heating curves and calorimetry had their beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century. Progress toward a DSC became possible as soon as continuous temperature monitoring with thermocouples was possible (see Fig. 4.8), and automatic temperature recording was invented (see also Sect. 4.1). These developments led to the invention of differential thermal analysis, DTA. In Sect. 2.1.3 an introduction to thermal analysis and its instrumentations is given.
Le Chatelier [1] seems to have been first to record temperature as a function of time in heating curves such as shown in Fig. 4.9. He used a mirror galvanometer...
