Renewable Insulation
Define a Problem
The purpose of this project was to make the best working insulation board as possible using common household materials.
Generate Concepts
Develop a Solution
Construct and Test Prototype
Evaluate Solution
I had a fairly cool experience with the Logger-Pro Equipment. It was cool to see real time how well our insulation was working. The topic of thermodynamics is something i find very interesting. While challenging, i do find it cool learning about it. Because it is difficult, our group made a few mistakes. We were unsure of what to shoot for and what material would work best . When making the insulator we made it too small to fit over the box, so we added more tinfoil and pop-sicle sticks to widen it. Through this project, i learned examples of good and bad insulators, how to make them, and how to use equipment from the field of thermodynamics.
This shows the change in temperature over 5 minutes. Temp. 1 is the temperature just outside the box on the other side of the insulation. Temp. 2 is the temperature directly inside the box. You can get an idea how well it worked by the temperature difference.
This picture is during the cool-down part of the project. We turned off the heat source to see just how long our insulation could retain the heat inside. The red shows the constant temperature outside the box while the blue represents the temperature lost over 7 minutes
Present solution
The popsicle sticks were glued together as a frame and cotton balls were unraveled and glued on it.
The cotton/stick frame is being placed and glued into the tin-foil in which will wrap around it.
In this picture, the final layer of tinfoil is being added along with the other pop-sicle sticks to keep it in place. To further insulate the structure, a layer of newspaper was added.
Conclusion
A modification i believe we should do would be to wrap an additional layer of newspaper under the final layer of tin foil. We were still under one inch thickness, so this wouldn't hurt but only help the capability of our insulation. Another thing we could've done would be to make the hole smaller for the temperature probe that goes through the insulation. The hole we made was messy and larger than necessary so a smaller hole would result in less heat loss. I think some other teams did better than us because they had more time to complete the actual experiment. They had a full 20 minutes to let it heat up and cool down which results in more heat to build up for them. We only had 7 minutes and not as much heat built up as we hoped.