Science Fair Questions

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1. Why can some materials insulate heat better than others? For example, metal can insulate heat better than wood.

2. In your opinion, what factors can affect heat and cold insulation?

3. From our experiment, we figured out that aluminum foil insulates heat the best, why do you think so?

4. When we applied cold to our materials, the temperature increased as soon as we took away the ice pack but then started decreasing. Do you think it increased because of the room temperature?



Thank you.

[rmarz]

Giraffee74838373 - First, let's get our terminology correct, that is the understanding of insulators and conductors. You may have them reversed. Do some research on these terms and you will get a better understanding of what causes some materials to be good thermal insulators or conductors. Next, look into the properties of materials to have 'thermal mass'. Materials like metals (conductors) have much higher thermal masses than materials like wood (insulators) so they store more or less thermal energy. I think if you study these simple issues, you'll have a much better understanding of the phenomena.

Rick Marz