Friday, 27 January 2017

heat - Does tea stay hotter with the milk in it?


A little thought experiment, similar to this one: Imagine you are making a cup of tea when the door bell rings. You've poured the boiling water into a cup with a teabag in it. As you're just about to pour milk in to the mix, the door bell rings.


My question is: what will keep the resulting drink hottest after my chat with the person at the door: quickly pouring the milk in, or leaving it in the carton until after the interruption ends?


Being a bit of a mathematician I'm happy to have the questions answered with a formula in terms of $t$ the length of the interruption, $m$, the temperature of the cold milk, $w$ the temperature of the hot water, $a$ the ambient temperature etc. I guess you'll have to use a model of how an insulated body loses/gains heat... feel free to use simplifying assumptions like the environment stays the same temperature etc.



My starting point from a physics point of view, is that heat is lost (or gained) proportional to the temperature difference between the object and the environment. So I imagine that would create some sort of exponential curve?




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