[en] It is of great interest to fusion designers and analysts to know in some detail the permeation and trapping characteristics of various metals for tritium. Specific parameters sought include diffusivity, diffusion activation energy, solubility, enthalpy of solution, tritium trap density and trapping energies. One way of looking for this information is to subject samples of the material containing tritium to thermal transients and measure the amount of tritium that is absorbed or released from the samples. In this report various factors that influence the observability of the parameters of interest and suggestions for structuring the tests are discussed. Samples for testing may be arbitrary in shape, but analysis is easiest on samples which may be treated as one-dimensional such as thin plates or long cylindrical rods or spheres. Most of the analysis presented here assumes simple thin, flat plate geometry for convenience. While second-order effects may vary between the various geometries, the fundamental results will be the same for all geometries. 4 refs., 6 figs., 1 tab