A simple and low-cost experimental method to determine the thermal diffusivity of various types of foods

Abstract

A simple low-cost method was used to measure the thermal diffusivity of nine different types of foods: potato, sweet potato, pumpkin, taro, radish, eggplant, lemon, tomato, and onion. We cut the foods into spherical shapes, inserted thermocouple sensors into their centers, and immersed them in boiling water. Fitting the time dependence of the center temperature to a heat-conduction model yielded a value for the thermal diffusivity with good consistency between spheres of different radii. This method can be generalized to determine thermal diffusivity of a wide variety of samples.