4. Renewable Insulation

Driving Question:

• How do engineers measure the R-Value of an insulating material?
• What are some ways in which composite insulation material produce minimum heat loss?

Project Description:

In this project we worked in teams to design a renewable composite insulation material. With this insulation material that we created we put it on top of our heat box(a light bulb heating up a Styrofoam box). Inside the box there is one LogTag recording the internal temperature. On top of the insulation material we have another LogTag recording the external or room temperature. Based on these recordings we can determine how good our insulation material is.

What I learned:

In this project I learned how insulators can alter the rate of energy transfer. I learned how to calculate energy using our temperature graphs for our heat box. The variable R means the rate of how much a material can resist heat. We calculated this by multiplying the area of our insulator with the rate of temperature change then divide that by wattage of our heat source (bulb).