How Does the Surface Area to Volume Ratio Affect Heat Loss in Organisms?

4067 words 17 pages
Biology Lab Report
BY:
Michael Ryan Pranata 11C |

Background: As heat is a form of thermal energy, they tend to have the behavior of reaching a thermal equilibrium. This means that when two bodies of different temperatures come in contact with each other, the hotter ones will transfer heat particles to the body with a colder temperature, with an aim to reach this “thermal equilibrium”, whatever the temperature may be. The larger the surface area, means there can be more “paths” from the sides of the body that are capable of releasing this heat particles, and reaching thermal equilibrium faster. This is what happens when a hotter body is subjected to a colder one.
Research Question:
How does the surface area to volume ratio affect
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For example, the smaller flask would have less, or the same rate of heat loss as compared to the bigger flask, provided the insulation given to the smaller flask is more conductive.

3. We’ve chosen to keep the same type of flasks for each trial for the experiment, and we’ve chosen the round bottom flasks. We have decided to keep this same, because if we use different flasks for different trials, the results obtained will be inaccurate as the surface area to volume ratio would not be same, and we cannot take the volume as “unit”, because the type of flasks are different.

4. We are conducting the experiment in all the same place therefore keeping the room temperature equal. Since this experiment is a very long experiment, and given many days to do, if we decide to conduct these experiments in different places, therefore the different room (surrounding) temperature would affect the rate of heat loss. For example, if we choose to do the experiment in a room with room temperature 20⁰C, and in a room with 30⁰C, the room with 30⁰C would have the results of all the flasks, with less rate of heat loss as compared to the room with 20⁰C.

5. The trials of the different flasks will be done simultaneously, so that the temperature and surrounding conditions would be as similar as possible. We’ve set the time of each experiment for as long as 3 minutes for each trial. The data will be collected in an interval of every 10 seconds. The time is kept as 3 minutes (180

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