Application of Smart Material in Block Calorimeters Experiment

Abstract

A Smart material can adapt to the external influences such as pressure, temperature, humidity, pH, electric or magnetic fields, an example is liquid crystal. Liquid crystal materials also can be applied for thermal mapping such as thermochromic liquid crystals (TLC) sheet. TLC sheet has a good response to the temperature changes which is shown by color play. This special characteristic of TLC can be used to explain some theoretical aspects of heat transfer on metals. The metals surface images during heating will be processed by converting the RGB images to the HSV images and then applied an edge detection method on hue images. From the thermal visualization, it can be shown that the largest heat exchange to the environment occurs at metal edges, so it is necessary to apply the heat insulator during the process of collecting data in block calorimeter experiments. The brass metal has the highest heat transfer rate, followed by copper and brass. It corresponds to the specific heat (c) of metals whichcsteel>ccopper>cbrass. Furthermore, it can be shown that since the heat starts to be evenly distributed until 300 seconds, the increasing of metals temperature is obtained ∆Tsteel<∆Tcopper<∆Tbrassand the increasing of mean hue (∆mean-hue) are obtained ∆mean-hue(steel)<∆mean-hue(copper)<∆mean-hue(brass). This result can be used to explain that in block calorimeter experiments, the measurement should be carried out after several minutes to obtain the even heat distribution across the entire metal surface.