Thermos Design Challenge

2/7/17

Materials for lab:

Aluminum foil
Electrical Tape
Paper Towels
Scotch Tape
Water
2 Plastic Foam Cups
Cotton Balls

Purpose of Lab: The concept of this lab was to understand how heat transfer works and which of them applies to our lab. By building a Thermos, we are able to determine which of the 3 types of heat transfer took place in the thermos, which was convection and conduction.

Procedures:

1) First of all, we wrapped the first cup in paper towels 3 times and tapped them together.

2) Second, we wrapped the first cup with 3 layers of aluminum foil and taped that together.

3) Then, we stuffed ⅓ of the first cup with cotton balls, and then placed the second cup inside it.

4) We continued to add additional cotton balls to fill in the gaps between the two cups until it was perfectly filled with cotton balls.

5) We then taped the whole thermos cup in electrical tape, including the second cup in the inside to secure it and trap the heat in. We also made sure to tape the bottom of the cup too.

6) Finally, we built a small aluminum foil lid that’s removable to keep the heat from leaving.

Once we were finished with building the Thermos cup, we proceeded to test the cup out by pouring 250 ml of water into it and recorded the temperature with a thermometer every minute for 20 minutes. We kept track by filling out a table, sketching a drawing of the thermos cup during the lab experiment, and graphing the results. The size of the cup was 6 feet high and 3.5 feet wide.

Results: In conclusion, the results of my lab showed that the temperature only dropped 6 degrees in 20 minutes. The initial temperature was 64 degrees and the final temperature was 58 degrees. Based on the results, the temperature dropped 1 degree every 3 minutes. It turns out that plastic foam is a pretty good insulator, compared to metal and glass.

These two pictures above are the data that I recorded onto Google Sheets. To the left, there's a table to record the temperature per minute and to the right, there's a graph showing how much the temperature drops. It gives us a better idea of how well the Thermos is working and how we could improve it.

The two pictures on the bottom is my Thermos Cup design. The first picture is from a horizontal point of view, but the second picture is from a bird's point of view, looking down at the cup, My group wrapped the whole cup in electrical tape for extra insulation, so you can't see the second cup and the interior of it.

In this picture, it shows a page of my lab report sketch about our research. These are the sketches of how our Thermos cup might look like, based on the research we conducted. Of course, our cup looks nothing like it, but it was to get some sort of idea inside our heads, so we wouldn't be totally clueless when we started the build. Funny enough, our design actually consisted of both of these ideas combined together.

This is a picture of the second page of my lab report, and this shows what the interior and exterior of the cup looks like. Judging by the image of the Thermos cup in horizontal and bird point of view, the cup doesn't look like much. It just seems like a distorted bottle with electrical tape covering it. In this picture, it depicts our cup's design perfectly, with the layers we included and how the Thermos cup was planned out. The difference between this sketch and the previous one is that this is the actual sketch of our Thermos cup while the other sketch was based purely on research.

This is a picture of our lab data based on the results of the experiment. There are 4 boxes, each representing the data in different methods. The first box to the left is a table recording the temperature for 20 minutes. The second box to the right are some focus questions for us to review. The third box is a graph showing us what the temperature decrease looks like. Lastly, the fourth box is a sketch of our Thermos during the experiment.