Space blankets, (a.k.a survival blankets) such as the one seen in the previous image, are very thin and have a roughly 5x greater than air, therefore they are a poor a preventing loss by . However, they do significantly reduce heat transfer by , which is the spontaneous emission of electromagnetic radiation by objects with temperature above absolute zero (so everything). sounds like a big deal, but its really just the descriptive scientific way to say light waves. Depending on the of the object, the emitted light may not be visible to us, but it’s there nonetheless. For example, your body emits that we cannot see, but cameras can detect such light and allow us to “see” objects that are at a different temperature from their environment even when no external light source is present.
Space blankets reflect the emitted by your body back to you, rather than letting it escape, thereby reducing the rate at which your body loses to the environment. Thermal radiation transfer is the reason why clear nights feel colder than cloudy ones and why you frost forms on top of your car, but not on the ground beneath it. In order to explain these observed phenomenon and quantify heat loss from your body, we need to take a deeper look at .
Some materials are more efficient at converting thermal energy to light than others and this material property, known as the (), affects the (). The radiated power also depends on the object’s surface area () and in (). The relates the radiated power to all of these variables and the Stephan-Bolztmann constant ():
Materials which are good at converting into light will also be good at the reverse process of absorbing light and converting it to thermal energy in the material. As a result, the into an object by radiation () can also be modeled using the Stephan-Bolztmann Law with the same emissivity value, only the incoming radiation is determined by the of the environment () rather than the object.
Net Thermal Radiation Rate
Subtracting the emitted radiation power from the absorbed radiation we can determine the net radiation power to the object:
Notice that when the object is warmer than its environment, will be negative because more radiation will be leaving the object than is absorbed.
Everyday Example: Space Blankets
Let’s evaluate the effectiveness of adding a space blanket during the wilderness survival example from the previous chapter. The situation was a 25 °F (-3.9 °C) day with a 10 mph wind and you are thin clothes that don’t stop the wind very well. Layering the space blanket on top should cut the wind, so right off the bat you save most of the 1100 W of due to () that we calculated in the last chapter. The blanket will reduce somewhat by trapping a layer of air, but within that layer will move to the blanket where it will be conducted across, so you still experience much of the 160 W conductive heat loss we calculated previously.
A space blanket would effectively eliminate the heat loss by reflecting your emitted radiation back to you. Even though you will still transfer thermal energy to the inside of the blanket by and from the inside, the blanket will do a poor job of radiating that energy away to outside because it has a relatively low .
Let’s figure out your without the space blanket in order to see what heat loss it actually saves you. To make the calculation easier, let’s assume a there is a layer of low clouds or heavy forest vegetation so that very little of the cold upper atmosphere is visible. In that case, the overall environmental temperature is just the -3.9 °C air temperature. We know body temperature 37 °C , but before we can calculate the net heat loss due rate to we must convert our temperatures to :
Now we can work to apply the for net radiation :
We find that the rate of radiative heat loss would be approximately 200 W without a space blanket. Therefore the space blanket saves you 200 W of radiative heat loss and 1100 W of convective heat loss, leaving only the 160 W of conductive heat loss. We see that a space blanket can significantly reduce is some situations. Considering this benefit compared to its small weight and volume, a space blanket seems like a reasonable addition to a survival kit. However, a space blanket will not serve as a substitute for appropriate clothing. A typical person has a resting thermal power of roughly 100 W, therefore the person in our example would still have a 60 W thermal power deficit. Over time resulting energy loss would lower the body until triggered a shivering response, which could boost the by up to 2.5 times, or up to 250 W. This strategy would only work short term, until the person was too tired to shiver. Alternatively, if the person in this example had gotten wet while wearing cotton then the resulting by would be roughly 1100 W (calculated in the Cotton Kills chapter) and shivering would not be able to make up for the thermal power deficit, even in the short term. Even shivering would not significantly delay a dangerously low body temperature in the wet cotton situation.
Reinforcement Exercises: Space Walk
We have a complication to mention: many materials have different at different ,which is the property of light that we perceive as colors. If the fraction reflected by an object is the same at all visible frequencies, the object is gray; if the fraction depends on the frequency, the object has some other color. For instance, a red or reddish object reflects red light more strongly than other visible frequencies and because it absorbs less red, it radiates less red when hot. Therefore its would be lower at frequencies we see as red. Differential reflection and absorption of frequencies outside the visible range have no effect on what we see, but they may have physically important effects with regard to. Skin is a very good absorber and emitter of infrared radiation, having an emissivity of 0.97 in the . This high infrared is why we can so easily feel infrared radiation from a campfire on warming our skin, but also why our bodies readily lose by infrared radiation. OpenStax University Physics, University Physics Volume 2. OpenStax CNX. Nov 12, 2018 http://email@example.com[/footnote]
- "Oregon Soldiers complete medical training" by Capt. Leslie Reed, U.S. Army National Guard is in the Public Domain ↵
- "Mylar Product Information" by DuPont Teijin Films ↵
- "Self Portrait with Thermal Imager" by Nadya Peek [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons ↵
- "Table of Emissivity of Various Surfaces" by Mikron Instrument Company, Inc. ↵
- "Nutritional Needs In Cold And In High-Altitude Environments: Applications for Military Personnel in Field Operations" byAndrew J. Young, Michael N. Sawka and Kent B. Pandolf, National Center for Biotechnology Information, National Institutes of Health ↵
- "Sunita Williams astronaut spacewalk" by NASA, via Wikimedia Commons is in the public domain ↵
a measure of a material's ability to conduct heat
An amount of thermal energy transferred due to a difference in temperature.
the process by which heat or directly transmitted through a substance when there is a difference of temperature between adjoining regions, without movement of the material
Electromagnetic radiation spontaneously emitted by all objects with temperature above absolute zero.
light waves, or coupled oscillating electric and magnetic fields fields that can travel through empty space and carry both energy and momentum without moving mass
a measure of the average kinetic energy of the particles (e.g., atoms and molecules) in an object, which determines how relatively hot or cold an object feels
image created by substituting visible color variations for temperature variations determined by measuring variations in thermal radiation intensity and/or wavelengths
energy stored in the microscopic motion of atoms and molecules (microscopic kinetic energy)
measure of a material's effectiveness at emitting energy as thermal radiation
the rate at which work is done, the rate at which energy is converted from one form to another
SI unit of temperature
The total radiant heat energy emitted from a surface is proportional to the fourth power of its absolute temperature.
amount of thermal energy transferred into our, out of an object as heat, per unit time
the amount of heat (thermal energy transferred due to a temperature difference) that leaves an object per unit time
transfer of heat due to the movement of fluid molecules driven by external factors other than thermal expansion.
Increase in rate of heat loss from objects that are warmer than air caused by the flow of air across the object surface.
Transfer of heat due to fluid movement caused by thermal expansion of the fluid
The condition of having a body temperature well below the normal range.
rate at which chemical potential energy is converted to thermal energy by the body, batteries, or heat engines. Also, rate at which thermal energy is converted to electrical energy by a thermal power plant.
the number of cycles or oscillations occurring per second, as in the frequency of the electromagnetic oscillations in a light wave
having a frequency just lower than visible red light but higher microwaves.