Analytical, Experimental and Computational Analysis of Heat Released from a Hot Mug of Tea

What is it about?

Abundant, affordable, reliable, and safe energy is the need of nowadays since much heat is wasted due to lack of innovation for converting it into useful purposes. Computational studies are helpful in analyzing physical phenomena releasing heat and saving costs and time that subjected to experimentations. This study is orchestrated to investigate the thermal analysis of heat emitted from the hot mug of tea into open atmosphere through convection, conduction, and radiation phenomena. There were analysed tea mugs made from different materials like glass, plastic, porcelain, and stainless steel. The mathematical models of the thermal energies modes associated with analyzed mugs were explored, coupled and simulated in FEM-based software to obtain productive conclusions. Simulation results showed that change of mesh type impacts on solution of the temperature versus time and space coordinate. Moreover, the influence of different parameters like surface radiosity, total heat flux, mean thermal diffusivity, radiative heat flux, internal total energy flux, and total energy were computed. Finally, the analytical time-varying cooling curves were validated with an experimental study and analytical solutions in good agreement for different mug materials used. On the bases of this study, we suggest that heat released from a warm mug of tea may be very useful if it employed to charge mobile battery through heating pads kept under hot mug of tea.

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Keywords: heat energy, convection, conduction, radiation, numerical simulation, finite element method, temperature measurements, analytical temperature solution

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