Heat Transfer is a junior level Mechanical Engineering course. The course is composed of a 2 credit-hour lecture section along with a 1 credit-hour lab. This course is taught by Peter Higgins; Prof Higgins has been teaching in Denver since 2005, you can send him an email at Peter Higgins.

Listed below are 9 experiments that students have performed since the Fall 2005. Click on any one to go to the experiment page to see details of each experiment along with pictures of the students performing them. Generally we try to do three or four of these during the semester.

LabVIEW, a product from National Instruments, is being introduced in this lab for operating an Omega 6018 data acquision system for visualizing the thermocouple readings and for logging this data to disk files for importing into Excel.

The Objectives for this lab course, which form the basis for determining students grades are found here.

Experiment 1 - Dwelling Analysis

Uses HOT2XP to perform a dwelling analysis on student's residence to predict energy costs based on home's construction and Denver weather

Experiment 2 - Critical Radius of Insulation

Demonstration of Critical Radius using glass tube on electrically heated NiCr wire

Experiment 3 - Lumped System Analysis

Cooling of an initially oven-heated 1 " brass ball in an air stream

Experiment 4 - Heat Exchangers

Study of heat transfer in three common types operating in parallel and contraflow

Experiment 5 - Pool Boiling

Study of the phases of boiling from a heated wire in a low temperature boiling fluid

Experiment 6 - Using Thermocouples

Hands-on construction of K type thermocouples, and the use of equipment to record temperature data

Experiment 7 - Numerical Analysis

Study of 2-D steady state and transient analysis of thermal diffusion in simple objects with insulated and non-insulated boundaries (eg nuclear fuel rods)

Experiment 8 - Thermal Conductivity of Pipeline Foam Insulation

Using transient analysis to determine k for the pipeline foam insulation used on the Trans Alaska pipeline.

Experiment 9 - Thermal Heat Capacity of Foam Powders

The Mumbai paper: This is the final paper that has passed peer review and has been accepted for publication at the heat transfer conference in Mumbai.

Using transient analysis to measure energy released from small samples of heated foam powder supplied by the Cyrogenics Test Laboratory of the Kennedy Space Center. These state-of-the-art foam powders are under consideration for upgrading the cyrogenics storage tanks at the launch complex.

Demo 10 - Weather glass

Replica made by Pilgrim Glass Co circa 1950 of Goethe's device, an early barometer, carried about the 19th century clipper ships for forecasting approaching storms.