NATS 1840 Lecture Notes - Wide-Body Aircraft, Clothes Dryer, Kilowatt Hour
20 Nov 2012
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Science, technology and the environment (sc nats 1840a) - tuesday. Heat and electromagnetic radiation: intimately connected in a manner crucial to understanding climate and climate change. It is going to absorb some of the energy from the sun and as it does so, but how does this absorption mechanism work, you have to think about the atoms that make up the rock. Through conduction the temperature increases due to the e. m. energy being absorbed. Rock loses thermal energy in e. m. form at the same time as it absorbs it. Frequency of emitted ration determine by object"s temperature. Constant temperature (steady state) reached when (total energy absorbed)/sec = (total energy radiated)/sec. No further net energy build-up in the object. At night no energy is absorbed, but rock continues to glow (lose energy) due to thermal content. Average frequency of glow increases with object"s temperature. Glow is distributed over a range (spectrum) of frequencies, with the peak determined by temperature.
