[time-nuts] Thunderbolt stability and ambient temperature

J. Forster jfor at quik.com
Thu Jun 11 14:51:01 UTC 2009


This is an absolutely standard problem in an undergraduate Heat Transfer
course. Look for heating or cooling a block of material and thermal
diffusivity. Take a look at most any decent text (Rosenow(?) & Choi,
'Heat, Mass, & Momentom Transfer') for example)

That said, the geometry of a ham makes a closed form solution more
difficult, requiring numerical methods.


-John

============

> As we are fairly off track here, let me relay a similar story. My mother
> has been working with food all her professional life. A christmas
> tradition here in Sweden is to have big lumps of ham from which you
> carve slices. However, the damn thing needs to be cooked. If you do it
> in the oven it dries out, if you only boil it you do not get that crisp
> surface people want. You can do a bit of both. However, one year she
> thought about cooking it in the microwave oven. She has no formal
> training in thermodynamics and didn't really involve me in the thought
> process, but she figured that if she ran the microwave for half an hour,
> after wrapping the ham in microwave-grade plastic, just to avoid it to
> dry out, and then just let it sit on the bench, then it would hit those
> 70 degrees in the core after a while anyway. Sure thing, it did. Worked
> like a charm. Perfectly cooked, juicy. What happends is that it takes
> time for the heat-wave to reach the core, so even if she stopped
> providing more heat the heat-wave was still in progress and just could
> not be stopped.






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