Mug Insulator Design Challenge
For this unit in science, the Penguin Project, we were asked to design and make things to help as understand the transfer of heat. In this particular design challenge, me and my fellow Ice Cube People made a box for teachers and other people to keep their coffee or whatever hot liquid warm.
We started by each doing a sketch of what we think will work best, this is the one I drew:
Then we compared our sketches, talking about which one would work best and how we can fix it to make it better, this is our final sketch before we made the prototype:
After we have a pretty good idea of how our insulator will look like, we started making a paper prototype. We only made 3 layers of the side because they are pretty much the same. So this is how it looks like:
So then we started making the real prototype. We changed and added somethings during we were making it. For example, we changed the mylar into foil because there wasn’t any. We also wrapped yarn around on the outside so it looks good and also help keeping the heat inside the box. So this is how it looks like:
We started testing with the help of Logger Pro. We started from 81.9 degrees celsius and ended with 75.6 degrees celsius after 20 minutes, so the difference was 6.3 degrees celsius, I think that’s pretty good. Here’s a screenshot of our Logger Pro graph:
Our design materials were chosen from the can demo that we did. During the can demo, we found that foil works best to keep food and other things warm or cool, so we used a lot of foil. We also used other things that worked well in the can demo, such as the fabric and wool/yarn.
I’m pretty proud how we made a box and not an ordinary insulator that you wrap around the mug. Making a box keeps the heat inside of the small space, and because we have foil on all 6 sides, the heat is reflected back and forth so the heat won’t easily get out of the space.
ALthough there is something we could do differently. At the beginning 3~4 minutes, when we touched the lid, it was already hot, which means the lid is not keeping heat down that successfully, so next time we could fix the lid a little, maybe add more material.
Our product is reusable so it’s not going do any damage to our environment.
Something hard about this project was dividing our work as a group so that everything can be done. Sometimes we didn’t know what was left for us to do, and making all the layers was a bit confusing.
At the end, our product looks pretty good and it worked well too. The group that was giving us feedback said:
During this project, I learned how to use radiation, convection and other ways of heat transfer to design, make and fix an insulator.
