Friday 15 April 2016

Evaporative cooling of my coffee??

I made a cup of coffee and put it down to cool. Then I realised I'd put it down in front of the fan heater. Will it cool? The heater was increasing the air temperature around the cup. This would mean that there was a smaller temperature difference between inside and outside so the rate of flow of thermal energy through the walls of the cup by conduction would be reduced. But I noticed a lot of water vapour coming out of the top of the cup - more than usual. The fan makes air move. Water molecules with high high kinetic energy in the coffee can break through the surface tension and escape. This is evaporation. Only the molecules with the most kinetic energy can do this so as they escape the average kinetic energy of the rest of the water molecules is reduced. Thus the coffee cools due to the evaporation. But if the evaporated molecules hang around above the surface, they get in the way and stop further evaporation. The fan blew them out of the way, encouraging evaporation and thus cooling the coffee. An odd situation - a proper experiment with a thermometer would determine whether evaporation or conduction had more effect on the cooling.