DailyDirt: Better Living Through Phase Change Materials
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
High school chemistry is probably the last time most folks hear about heats of fusion. As a quick reminder, when solid materials are melted, there's the energy to just heat up the material, and then there's some extra energy that goes into melting the solid (if it has a melting point) -- and that's the heat of fusion. This property can actually be useful for maintaining temperatures near the melting point of a material -- and that's a phase change material (PCM). This kind of thing can be done with other phase changes, too. Here are some interesting examples.- Keeping your coffee at just the right temperature (~140 Fahrenheit) for longer periods of time is a convenient reality with phase change materials. Next up: Earl Grey. Hot. [url]
- PCMs can help to save babies! Keeping babies warm and not too cold is an awesome application for PCMs. [url]
- Swamp coolers take advantage of a very common material, water, for its heat of vaporization. Too bad, this kind of evaporative cooling only works in low humidity. [url]
- Wikipedia lists several applications for PCMs, along with a lot of other cool facts about these materials. It doesn't mention Coffee Joulies, but that could obviously change. [url]
- To discover some other chem/nanotech-related stuff, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Filed Under: coffee joulies, pcm, phase change material, swamp cooler
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Typo
(emphasis mine)
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Typo
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
http://technewsdaily.co.za/2010/06/28/energy-saving-air-conditioner-system-5090-percent-less -energy/
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
http://www.coolerado.com/tech-info/
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Coffee At 140° Celsius ...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Coffee At 140° Celsius ...
Obviously, coffee's gaseous phase change happens well before 140 C..
[ link to this | view in chronology ]