Newton's law of cooling revisited

Abstract

The cooling of objects is often described by a law, attributed to Newton, which states that the temperature difference of a cooling body with respect to the surroundings decreases exponentially with time. Such behaviour has been observed for many laboratory experiments, which led to a wide acceptance of this approach. However, the heat transfer from any object to its surrounding is not only due to conduction and convection but also due to radiation. The latter does not vary linearly with temperature difference, which leads to deviations from Newton's law. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of the cooling of objects with a small Biot number. It is shown that Newton's law of cooling, i.e. simple exponential behaviour, is mostly valid if temperature differences are below a certain threshold which depends on the experimental conditions. For any larger temperature differences appreciable deviations occur which need the complete nonlinear treatment. This is demonstrated by results of some laboratory experiments which use IR imaging to measure surface temperatures of solid cooling objects with temperature differences of up to 300 K.

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