Blog Post 2

Introduction

My project aims to find the thermal resistance of different cloth insulators by finding heat flux and the temperature differential on both sides of the material, and plugging these numbers into the following equation:

Progress so Far

I am behind in terms of data collection as of now, but things are coming along and I have my first 2 trials of my experiment. I have everything set up and ready to run more trials, so from now on things should be quite easygoing. My data is quite easy to analyze and collect.

Challenges and Problem-solving

My biggest challenge so far was setting up all of my sensors, as there was quite a bit of wiring that I had to do. Additionally I originally ran into some issues with one of the drivers on my computer so the setup took me longer to prepare than I hoped. Despite this, I have everything running properly right now and collection will not take too long.

Trial 1

After setting up my experiment, I let my first trial run from the very moment that I put everything together. My data is collected by waiting 1 minute after my temperature stabilizes to ensure that this is a steady-state experiment and then taking the avreage heat flux and temperature for one minute. In this trial, the sensors were running long before it was time to collect data.

Trial 2

In this trial I waited longer before collecting data, which made things easier for me because this graph was easier to extract data for, and was clearly in a steady-state. I used the same method for this experiment, taking an average for 1 minute after i started running the sensor for the next minute.

Reflection

In these past couple of weeks I learned just how complicated my topic really is. Measuring resistivity quantitatively is not as simple as a temperature differential, the amount of energy passing through the material must be accounted for. Additionally, I had to do some simple electrical engineering for my setup, allowing my chip to interpert the data coming from the sensor.

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