Did you know that HEAT is a form of energy that moves and flows from one place to another, but COLD does not really exist at all? Imagine being a first-year chemistry student, 15 years old, maybe one for whom English is a second language, trying to comprehend this idea. Your teacher tells you that the heat from your hand is moving from your hand into the melting ice cube, but all you can feel is the intense coldness of the ice cube "burning" into the palm of your hand!
We need a thermal imaging camera and infrared thermometers so that they will be able to effectively study heat. This project will help students visualize the flow of heat from one place to another by allowing them to "see" the heat rather than just measuring temperature, which does not always provide evidence of the direction of heat flow. We will use a thermal imaging device attached to a cell phone camera to visualize warmer and colder areas while doing convection, phase change, thermal gradient, and heat of reaction experiments. We will use it to test the effectiveness of insulators and even to study the difference in heat flow in warm-blooded vs. cold-blooded animals!
Infrared thermometers will allow us to get instantaneous heat measurements on different surfaces, something that is not possible with traditional thermometers. With this tool, we will be able to measure heat capacity of specific materials that are not always containable in a beaker or a test tube.
About my class
Did you know that HEAT is a form of energy that moves and flows from one place to another, but COLD does not really exist at all? Imagine being a first-year chemistry student, 15 years old, maybe one for whom English is a second language, trying to comprehend this idea. Your teacher tells you that the heat from your hand is moving from your hand into the melting ice cube, but all you can feel is the intense coldness of the ice cube "burning" into the palm of your hand!
We need a thermal imaging camera and infrared thermometers so that they will be able to effectively study heat. This project will help students visualize the flow of heat from one place to another by allowing them to "see" the heat rather than just measuring temperature, which does not always provide evidence of the direction of heat flow. We will use a thermal imaging device attached to a cell phone camera to visualize warmer and colder areas while doing convection, phase change, thermal gradient, and heat of reaction experiments. We will use it to test the effectiveness of insulators and even to study the difference in heat flow in warm-blooded vs. cold-blooded animals!
Infrared thermometers will allow us to get instantaneous heat measurements on different surfaces, something that is not possible with traditional thermometers. With this tool, we will be able to measure heat capacity of specific materials that are not always containable in a beaker or a test tube.