Heat conduction in carrots studied with an IR-camera

Abstract

Heat conduction and diffusion are important phenomena for the understanding of many physical, chemical and biological processes. In physics education these topics are an area to effectively relate the complexity of the mathematical description with modern experimental techniques that enable students to conduct their own research projects. In this work an infrared (IR) camera was used to image temperature profiles of carrot cross-sections after boiling. Using modelling of the spatial and temporal evolution of the heat conduction process it was possible to extract a value of the thermal diffusivity of D = (2.3 ± 0.2) × 10−7 m2 s−1. From this a thermal conductivity κ = (0.9 ± 0.1) W m−1 K−1 was calculated. The heat transfer coefficients between water and carrot of h W = (333 ± 50) W m−2 K−1 and between air and carrot of h A = (7 ± 1) W m−2 K−1 were determined. This experiment could be potentially used as an experiment in the general physics or in the advanced physics laboratory in the second or third year.