Heat Shield Project

Taken by me. Heat shield without the spackling.

A while ago in my science class, we did a unit on heat and learned about conduction and convection and all that stuff. At the end we did a very interesting project where we had an egg and we had to protect it from being cooked by a blow torch. We would have to use the properties of certain materials to combine and shield the egg from being cooked alive. Before this, we would have to construct our heat shield and run tests with different material combinations using a heat gun. With my team of two other people, we ran our first test.

We decided to test a small steel plate with some spackling on it. We used the heat gun on the side with no spackling and at the end, the side that was not against the heat was hotter then the hot side. We then tried this with aluminum foil to reflect some heat and put the spackling on the hot side. This worked very well. We decided to add more insulation and ran tests for felt and sponges. We ended up with the sponge as our final design. The shield was aluminum foil, then sponge, and finally spackling on the sponge.

On the day of testing there was this one team who made their shield entirely out of aluminum foil which has a melting point well below the blowtorches heat. When we tested ours, the egg was charred and had 3 millimeters of cooking on the inside which was pretty good for the class. Nobody’s egg was uncooked in the end which was disappointing but the overall experience was very fun.