March 9, 2017
9:08 pm
Congratulations to High school science teacher, Chris DiCarlo, who has been selected to present his paper titled, “Modeling Behavior of Solar Ovens.” Mr. DiCarlo will be presenting on March 18th at Quinsigamond Community College. Below is a description from Mr. DiCarlo on the talk he will be giving:
This talk will present a solar oven project done with a Conceptual Physics class. Students use free web-based stock-flow modeling software to simulate the behavior of heat being transferred to and from an object. Newton’s Law of Cooling is addressed by measuring time dependent temperatures of hot water cooling to room temperature. Students build a computer model that mimics the behavior observed. They then build simple solar ovens and extend their their computer models by incorporating an inflow of energy from the sun to predict the temperature of their ovens over time. The ovens are tested outside on a sunny day and temperature data is collected. Students then go back and revise their models to get a better understanding of how the ovens actually behaved.
