Renewable Insulation

Name: Anish Roy

Class Period: 1B

Home Campus: Heritage High School

Project Objective: Your team will utilize low-cost, common household items to create insulation that will trap heat from a light bulb inside, your objective is to stop heat from escaping to the best of your ability.

Design Process: For this project, we discussed materials that could be used as insulation, then team members brought those items in and we constructed our device for heat encapsulation. Then we took data on how much heat we permitted to escape and how much the internal and external temperatures differed from the start; a graph went along with this portion. Then we finally did calculations to calculate the exact amount by which heat was exchanged within our system.

Learning Target: Understand how heat escapes, and how to regulate the number of heat changes that occur within a system. Furthermore, learn about insulation and how to determine the usability for specific insulation.

Personal Reflection: I have learned many things from the project, for example, I learned how to find heat using the equation Q=mC∆T, and more specifically, how to find the movement of heat, both into and out of a system in thermodynamics. Some of the concepts we were starting in AP Physics 2, however, this experiment helped me visualize how the movement of heat actually worked. Furthermore, I actually enjoyed the brainstorming part since it really helped me utilize creativity and the suggestions were enjoyable to come up with. Additionally, the calculations phase was also pretty simple for me, however, I do need to work on the creation of graphs, for most of that part I was confused because most of the systems that my teammates were using were new for me. I also need to improve on recognizing which set of temperatures I need to be using from a data set, for example, when I was asked to find the change in temperature of the heat leaving the box, I was confused because the numbers that I was working with was giving me an unreasonable which I knew couldn’t be right, but I worked determinately and figured it out, however, it should have been done faster.