Abstract
Save Heat is a thermal engineering project focused on minimizing heat loss through nanocoating insulation for long-term energy storage systems. The goal was to understand how heat is transferred through insulated systems, and to quantify how effective different design choices are in retaining thermal energy over long periods of time.
The project combined theoretical heat transfer analysis, simulation, and hands-on experimentation to evaluate thermal performance, with a strong emphasis on validating models using temperature data. Save Heat was designed to mirror real-world thermal challenges found in energy storage applications, where small heat losses compound over time.
Overall Results
- Achieved measurable heat retention, limiting temperature drop to approximately 0.3 °C over a 14-hour test period.
- Validated thermal simulations with <10% experimental error, demonstrating strong agreement between modeled and real behavior.
- Identified dominant heat loss mechanisms (primarily conduction and natural convection) and quantified their impact over long-duration tests.
- Demonstrated that careful insulation selection significantly improve thermal stability without active heating.
R&D
The R&D process followed an engineering-driven workflow:
- Problem definition: Identify sources of heat loss and define performance metrics (temperature stability over time).
- Theoretical modeling: Applied heat transfer principles (conduction, convection) to understand heat loss.
- Simulation: Built thermal models to predict temperature decay and spatial gradients.
- Experimental setup: Assembled an insulated system instrumented with thermocouples for long-duration testing.
- Validation & iteration: Compared simulation outputs with experimental data, refined assumptions, and recalibrated models to reduce error.
This iterative loop emphasized model credibility, not just simulation accuracy, reflecting industry-standard thermal validation practices.
Skills developed
Skills (2)
Technical Tools and Charts