Recent content by Steve_

Sorry this took so long; life got in the way. I made some basic measurements and have a picture to share. There were two experiments: First was the solar oven or temperature vs. time for the clear plastic box. The instrumentation was an old Fluke 77AN DVM with the 80TTK thermocouple module. I...

Thanks to all for the thoughts. I will study the shape-memory wiki entry. It's still over 100F here and I can set up an experiment using my Fluke and a thermocouple to get some temperature data. The wall thicknesses will be interesting to know also. Then I will immerse the bottles in hot...

I beg forgiveness if this should be in chemistry; to me it seems more of a physics problem. This summer I had two Polyethylene terephthalate (PETE) spice bottles deform due to the sun shining on the clear plastic tub, Polypropylene(PP) in which they were stored. The first time the big tub was...

Hello, Sometime in the last 6 months I read that researchers analyzing data from the decay of a subatomic particle and reported that the decay appeared to be random or unpredictable. I recall they said this particular reaction was very low level. This would have been in either Science, Nature...

Russ, sorry this took a while, I was without internet the last few days. The problem was the transport of heat from a hot elelctronic part to the air. But I was just asking about the part where a hot mass is submersed in a cool mass. Like a single fin in air or water. It looks like the total...

Thanks all for the replys. My perception was inaccurate and I am corrected. I went looking for the math that might help me understand the relationship of Cp and k to temperature. (This is from the Handbook of Physics, Springer 2006, pp753.) dQ/dt for a mass cooling while submersed in...

I got into a discussion about heat sink materials and was beaten up for suggesting that Aluminum is better than Copper because it will transfer the heat away from itself much faster than copper. Copper has about half the specific heat and about twice the thermal conductivity over Aluminum. Am...