- Scientists have discovered that Fourier’s law, a 200-year-old scientific law that shows how heat spreads through solid materials, may be wrong..
- Stating that this research actually started with a small question, the material scientist answered this question: “What if heat travels in a different way, not just in the way people assume?” explained as.
Scientists have discovered that a nearly 200-year-old scientific law showing how heat spreads through solid materials may actually be wrong. This law, known as Fourier’s law, describes how heat is transferred or conducted through solids. But in recent years, researchers have discovered that movement at the nanoscale, which is how heat spreads through solids, may actually be invalid.
Kaikai Zheng, a polymer physicist at the University of Massachusetts, and his team wondered whether laws similar to Fourier’s law might work macro in transparent materials such as translucent polymers and inorganic glasses. These materials, which are essentially translucent, can allow some wavelengths of light to pass through. Although the light is not completely absorbed as in opaque materials, it is bounced and scattered due to the conditions in the structure of the material. This led Zheng and his team to hypothesize that not only could heat pass through these solid materials, but their translucency might also allow heat energy to pass through the materials in the form of thermal radiation. In fact, electromagnetic waves are carried as infrared radiation in radiant air, and an example of this is the temperature we feel when the Sun’s rays reach the Earth.
Stating that the research started with a question, materials scientist Steve Granick from the University of Massachusetts said, “Actually, this research started with a simple question. The question is ‘What if heat travels in a different way, not just the way people assume?’ was.” he said. The researchers hung the strips they would use for the test inside a custom-made vacuum chamber. In this way, the vacuum eliminated the possibility of heat dissipation from the materials through the air. The team then fired second-by-second pulses of laser beams at the materials to heat them and measured how the heat spread through each material using three methods.
The team noted that translucent materials radiate heat internally. Because he suggested that structural defects act as heat sinks and sources of heat, allowing heat to spread from point to point rather than spreading slowly. “Fourier’s Law isn’t wrong, it just doesn’t explain everything we see and know when it comes to heat conduction,” says Steve Granick of the University of Massachusetts. he said.
The researchers state that this development they found could help engineers design new strategies for heat management in translucent materials. The team thinks this work reveals a broader understanding of how heat propagates in solids.
Study, PNAS It was published in the magazine.
Compiled by: Davut Bulut