Materials Testing
While getting heat and light into your home is an important and challenging task, keeping the heat and light inside is just as important and challenging. Getting heat in your house means nothing if you can't keep it there. This is why almost every house has some form of insulation. A good insulator is something that doesn't conduct heat well. Usually, when looking for a good insulator, you want something airy, like cotton. Cotton is a horrible conductor, meaning it is bad at transferring heat, making it great for insulating.
Our goal in this lab was to find materials that would work best for insulating. We brainstormed a list of ideas, and came up with a bunch. We ended up narrowing it down to six materials. Those materials were jeans, fiberglass, rigid foam, felt foam, spray foam, and reflective bubble wrap. The object that we decided to try to insulate was hat dogs. We made six different containers, each of them made up of a different material. We boiled the hot dogs in a pot, and then took their temperature immediately after we took them out. We then placed all of the hot dogs each into a different container. We took the temperature of the hot dog every 2 minutes to see it's heat loss. My hypothesis was that the best insulator was going to be the fiberglass. That turned out to be the third most efficient material for insulating the hot dog. The worst insulator was spray foam. It had a net gain of -22 degrees Celsius. Next, it was the jeans. They had a net gain of -21 degrees Celsius. The third worst was the rigid foam. It had a net gain of -19 degrees Celsius. The third best was the fiberglass. It had a net gain of -16 degrees Celsius. The two best were reflective bubble wrap, and felt foam. They were one degree apart. The net gain for the reflective bubble wrap was -11 degrees Celsius, and the net gain for the felt foam was -10 degrees Celsius, proving it to be the most efficient insulator out of the six materials that we tried. These results do not necessarily mean that the felt foam is the best insulator. It just means that they worked the best in our test. Our test gave us a good idea, but was by no means the definite answer to our problem. If we wanted a really good answer, we would have to try it on a model of a house. Plus, all of the containers that we used would have to be exactly the same size for it to be an accurate experiment. Another thing that we could have done better is we could have paid more attention to the hot dogs; sometimes, we would miss the 2 minute mark to take the temperature, and it made the results a little bit shaky. But for the most part, this experiment did give us a general sense of what materials would work well as an insulator, and which ones wouldn't. |