Thursday, March 21, 2019

Cooling with the Assumption of an Internal Resistance to Heat Flow in the Body


  I tried some electrical analogies for the cooling data posted a few days ago and a parallel process involving two cooling mechanisms resulted in the same equation for the temperature as a function of time but with a combined effective rate constant. A series circuit process could be considered analogous to a battery having an internal resistance with a voltage drop across it. This would be the Thevenin equivalent for a heated body. The differential equation for the temperature at the surface, Ts, is show below along with its solution where Ts=T0 at t=0 and Ta is the ambient temperature.


The fit to the data collected confirms that this is a plausible explanation for the cooling mechanism.


The ambient temperature appears to be too high but the data doesn't track the cooling down all the way down to the ambient temperature. There was a warm coffee maker nearby which may have raised the effective ambient temperature. More data and more care is setting up the experiment are likely to produce better results.

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