Chilling Winters!
Classical Mechanics
Level
1
On a cold winter day, which would you choose to keep warm:
- A thick quilt
- Two blankets of half the thickness of the quilt
Assume that the quilt and the blankets are made up of the same material.
A thick quilt
Two blankets of half the thickness
Both will produce the same effect
This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try
refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and,
finally, (c)
loading the
non-javascript version of this page
. We're sorry about the hassle.
Even though joining the two blankets results in an equal total thickness as the quilt, there will be a difference in the warmth provided by the two.
Neither the quilt nor the blanket produces its own heat. So, how do they give the warmth to the person inside? As a person enters in a blanket, he finds that the blanket is as cold as other stuff in the room. Slowly and steadily the blanket warms up. In actuality, it is the heat of the body of the person which is accumulating inside the quilt or the blanket.
The blanket works as a heat insulator, which blocks the heat energy of the body from leaving. The heat slowly and steadily accumulates inside the blanket and hence the blanket warms up.
When two blankets are joined together, a layer of air is trapped in between them. This air behaves as a bad conductor of heat and helps in stopping the heat to go out of the blanket. Therefore, two blankets will serve the motive better that one thick quilt.