Newton's law of cooling and your body

[captainjack2000]

Homework Statement

a body has temperature 27C at twelve oclock. The room temperature is constant at 16C. Two hours later the body was found to have a temperature of 24C. The temperature of a normal human body is 37C.Using Newton's law of cooling estimate the time of death.

Homework Equations

Newton's law of cooling says that the rate of heat loss from a body is proportional to the temperature difference between it and the surroundings.
dQ/dt=hA(Te-Tb)
where Te is the temp of the environment 16C=289K and Tb is the temp of the body 24C=297K. I am not sure what the heat transfer coefficient h is or how to determine this. Also not sure how to use the fact that normal body temperature is 37C

Could someone please give a bit of a start in the right direction
Thank you

 

[Doc Al]

Think of Newton's law of cooling in this form:
dT/dt = -k(T - Te)

What's the general form of the solution to that equation?

 

[jdwood983]

After some googling, the heat transfer coefficient for an idle body is 2.1 W/m^2\cdot K and the approximated surface area is 1.7 m^2.

As for solving this, you'd need to integrate your equation (which btw should be dT/dt, not dQ/dt and find the temperature at a later time t is

<br /> T(t)=T_a+\left(T_0-T_a\right)\exp[-hAt]<br />

where T_a is the ambient temperature and T_0 is the initial temperature of the body.