Energy In a Heated Room

For most people coming in from a frosty, cold day they will automatically turn up their heat or the stove to warm up quickly. People may think that turning on some heat will help heat up their bodies quicker; however, this is not the case. “A room is not heated by increasing its internal energy but by decreasing its entropy due to the fact that during heating, the volume and pressure remain constant and air is expelled.”(Emden) The idea that our bodies warm up quicker a heat source is not true because the air temperature in a room will increase by the stove but the air molecules leave through openings to keep the atmospheric pressure the same. Since the air molecules leave to keep the atmospheric pressure level there are not enough molecules to keep the room warm because the molecules that are left do not produce enough kinetic energy to keep it warm.

So, how does this affect our bodies? There are two main components as to why our bodies warm up quickly from the provided heat; infrared radiation and air molecules. “Heat in a body of matter is the sum of the kinetic energies of all the separate particles that make up the body.” (Beiser) The first component; infrared radiation, is dealing with how much heat our bodies are giving out in a room. When we increase the room temperature our bodies are giving off heat and receiving heat to help elevate our body temperature. In this process of giving and receiving heat we lose energy from giving off infrared radiation. However, we gain it back from the air molecules that are carrying the infrared radiation from the stove or heater.

The second component; air molecules, is dealing with the infrared radiation from the stove or heater. The air molecules are carrying and then colliding with other air molecules and our bodies to build our kinetic energy back up. The higher we set our heater temperature or how hot our stove becomes the more air particles have to either escape or collide with each other which in return produces more infrared heat. When we introduce our bodies to this environment our kinetic energy rises because the air molecules collide with our body heat and it’s being replaced with warm heat while eliminating the cold from our bodies. “When a warmer body is brought into contact with a cooler body, thermal energy flows from the warmer one to the cooler until their two temperatures are identical. The warmer body loses a quantity of thermal energy in the change of E, and the cooler body acquires the same amount of energy. We describe this process by saying that the change in E joules of heat has passed from the warmer body to the cooler one." (chem1)

Annotated Bibliography

Beiserm A., Krauskopf, K., The Physical Universe. New York. McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 2010. ISBN: 978-0-07-351212-9.pg. 157.