Tucson Science Daily News
By : Yuliana Santos and Jennifer Enriquez
Introduction
Do you know about the three major ways of heat? Well theirs convection, radiation, conduction. Today are topic is going to be about convection. What is convection? It is when thermal energy is transferred through a material by movement of heated matter. Have you ever been in a hot air balloon? Do you know how it rises to the air? Well its because of convection. This is how it works, in a hot air balloon if the pocket of air is heated it will rise because its less dense then the rest of the air. As the pocket air rises , it then cools and then will move. In other words how the air balloon rises is because the air that is warmer than the surrounding air.
A Boiling Pot Of Water
You can clearly see the convection of the air rising.
A Hot Air Balloon
The cold air goes down and the warm air goes up. Inside a hot air balloon a flame heat is trapped pocket of air. As its heated the surrounding air becomes warmer then the air. Which in total makes it go up.
Convection Cell
The warm air rising goes up and the cold air stays down.
About convection and more
About density and temperature/ how they are realted
Now I am going to talk about density of matter and how it is related to temperature. For example fluids like air and water when they are heated, the molecules that make that fluid get energy and move faster. Once they are moving really fast the moving molecules will from together and will become bigger. As an example if you were to inflate a balloon and slowly/carefully heat the air that's in the balloon, the air in the balloon becomes bigger. If it cools though it becomes dense.
More about convection
Convection is not that easy to see though, but when your boiling a pot of water you can clearly see it happening. Also the movement of air is from the earths atmosphere itself. Convection is very important in the earths atmosphere but the convection also does the movement of tectonic plates. It also creates clouds which we need to live for precipitation for a supply of water. In conclusion convection is very important on earth and its one of the major models of heat transfer.