What is the quickest form of heat transfer?
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Laffite (
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December 11th, 2006
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The quickest form would be through the transfer of energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation. Infrared Heating or Microwave Energy are examples of this. The radiation travels at the speed of light until the energy is absorbed in a material and you feel it as heat.
I accidentally hit the "Enter" key and my response got posted before I finished. Two other heat transfer methods are also noteworthy. In materials, sapphire is an excellent conductor of heat, even though it is an insulator. Silver is among the best conductors of heat for metals. However, the champ among materials is superfluid liquid helium @ 1.7 degrees kelvin.
@arnieb, would EMR be considered heat transfer or energy conversion?
For pure transfer from heat from one object to another, I guess just straight up conduction. Also, you couldn’t maintain liquid helium at 1.7 kelvins if you were transferring heat through it. Right?
As far as I know with computer heatsinks…
Copper is a better conductor than aluminium, but aluminium actually gets ‘rid’ of the heat better than aluminium does (hence it can be more popular!)
Convection, the movement of a heat medium is much faster means of heat transfer than any other form. Power plants, air conditioning, internal combustion engine, etc, etc all use this form.
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Radiation.It requires no medium to transfer heat.That’s how we get heat from Sun through empty space.Though, some might argue that space is composed of ether.
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The quickest form of heat transfer…. thats some tricky wording.
– If you want to know how fast the heat travels as in velocity (m/s): radiation
– If you want to know the fastest rate of heat transfer (J/s): conduction if the objects are in direct contact, convection if the two objects are at a distance (and there is a medium between the two).
But then all these depend on other factors – Temperature of the object for example. Because radiation heat transfer is related to Temp to power of 4 (and convection and conduction are related to Temp to power 1) it would eventually become the dominating heat transfer rate component (J/s) at a certain Temp..
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