Why Did Plywood Surface Temperature Initially Lag in Heating Experiment?

  • Thread starter Thread starter TSN79
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    increase
Join the discussion
Registration is free. Ask a follow-up in this thread, or start your own.
1 reply · 2K views
TSN79
Messages
422
Reaction score
0
In an experiment I heated a room and logged the temp change as it went up. One of the walls in the room is made of plywood. I also logged the temp on this surface (on the heated side). When I looked at the graph after the experiment I noticed that as the air temp of the room went up, the surface temp of the plywood was reluctant to follow the change. It only increased slightly for a while before suddenly skyrocketing about ten degrees within a few minutes.

When I did the whole thing again the next day, the same thing didn't happen. Now the surface temp rose evenly with the room temp.

I'm confused as to this "reluctantness" in the first experiment. Any explanations?
 
Engineering news on Phys.org
There's got to be some reason for it. Is this room in a controlled environment or is it in a house somewhere? It could be an instrumentation error. How did you instrument the wall surface? A sudden increase in a material like plywood is pretty unnatural in a normal setting unless there is a fire or something along those lines.

Also, I would look for heating ducts, etc...running through the wall. Anything to transfer heat away from the surface.

Can you go into more detail about the wall's construction?