Blogging by Heath™

TL;DR: In a recent camping trip we noticed just how cold our propane tank was getting after cooking for a while - we started out pretty chilly anyway (about 50 F). The physics of this is cool and I wanted to play with modeling it. I have one of these little two burner propane stoves that we use when camping, it looks something like this: While we were cooking breakfast and boiling water for coffee, we noticed that the propane tank was getting super cold - there was not only a thick layer of frost forming on the outside, but a small chunk of solid ice on the bottom of the tank where it met the picnic table…

In the Fall of 2017, while finishing my PhD I taught ChE thermodynamics to a class of graduate and advanced undergraduate students at the University of Rhode Island. I recently discovered some of my old course materials and decided to post them publically. It was a project based class, so after the first few lectures, most of the class meetings were spent working on problems and projects. Either way, I hope they are useful to someone!