UP Mathematician Develops Model For Heat Propagation Through Rough Surfaces

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Suppose you have a pair of pants you need to wear tomorrow. The problem is, you just washed them, and they’re still damp. So you resort to a handy tool: the flat iron.

Using the iron, you can easily dry the flat parts of the pants, but you will notice that it is more difficult to dry some areas where the surface is uneven – near the zipper, the side and back pockets, the seams, and the waistband.

That’s because the heat from the iron does not reach the uneven areas as quickly as it does the flatter areas. In other words, the heat propagation, or the heat transfer from the iron to the pants, is not uniform on rough surfaces.

Understanding how heat propagates from one material to another is important in designing efficient cooling devices, such as air conditioners, or constructing infrastructures that minimize heat from the sun. In some cases, heat propagation is simple to model when the boundary at which the two materials touch is flat, such as ironing the flat areas of the pants. In other cases, however, the heat propagation model is more complex when the boundary is rough, such as when ironing the uneven areas of the pants.

By: Harvey Sapigao

Model for two materials with a rough interface (Photo Credit: Avila et. al. 2024)

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