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Chapter 19: Problem 1

Could you cool the kitchen by leaving the refrigerator open? Explain.

Short Answer

Expert verified
No, leaving the refrigerator open wouldn't cool the kitchen, but would rather increase the temperature due to the heat expelled by the refrigerator's increased efforts to cool its interior.

Step by step solution

01

Understanding the function of a refrigerator

A refrigerator works by utilizing the principle of thermodynamics. It removes heat from the inside, cooling the contents, and expels that heat to the outside, effectively warming the surroundings.
02

Consider the effect of leaving the refrigerator open

When the refrigerator door is open, the refrigerator detects the rise in interior temperature and starts working harder to reach the desired coolness, thereby expelling more heat into the kitchen.
03

Conclusion

Even though the inside of the fridge is cooler and seems like it might cool the kitchen, this isn't the case. The refrigerator would have to work harder to try to cool down, and the end result would be more heat being expelled, warming up the kitchen instead of cooling it.

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Key Concepts

These are the key concepts you need to understand to accurately answer the question.

Refrigerator Function
A refrigerator is a household appliance commonly used to preserve food by maintaining a low internal temperature. It operates on the basic principles of thermodynamics. The core idea is to transfer heat from the inside of the refrigerator to the outside environment.
  • The heart of the refrigerator is the refrigerant, a liquid that absorbs heat.
  • Once it absorbs heat, the refrigerant is compressed and cycled through coils which are usually located at the back or bottom of the fridge.
  • As the refrigerant releases this heat, it returns to its original state, ready to absorb more heat from the refrigerator's interior.
By understanding these principles, one can see how the refrigerator acts as a heat pump, constantly moving heat out of the fridge to keep it cool."
Heat Transfer
Heat transfer is a fundamental concept in thermodynamics and is crucial to understanding how a refrigerator functions. There are three main modes of heat transfer: conduction, convection, and radiation.
  • Conduction: The transfer of heat through direct contact. Inside a fridge, heat from warm objects is conducted away by the cool surfaces and eventually transferred to the refrigerant.
  • Convection: The circular motion that occurs when warmer fluid rises and cooler fluid sinks. This helps distribute temperature evenly inside the refrigerator.
  • Radiation: The emission of energy via electromagnetic waves. Although less relevant in refrigeration, this process can influence heat transfer in other contexts.
When the refrigerator door is left open, the device must work harder to counteract the heat constantly entering, leading to more heat being expelled into the surrounding space, like the kitchen.
Kitchen Cooling
The idea of cooling a kitchen by leaving the refrigerator door open might seem intuitive at first, but understanding the thermodynamics behind the operation reveals the opposite outcome. When a refrigerator door is open:
  • The appliance detects a temperature rise inside and increases its cooling efforts.
  • This increased effort causes the refrigerator to consume more energy, leading to the compressor working harder.
  • As a result, more heat is expelled from the refrigerator's coils to the kitchen, countering the desired cooling effect.
Thus, instead of cooling, the refrigerator effectively becomes a small-scale heater for the kitchen, making the room warmer rather than cooler. This concludes that leaving a refrigerator open is not an efficient means of cooling any space.

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Most popular questions from this chapter

A power plant extracts energy from steam at \(250^{\circ} \mathrm{C}\) and delivers 800 MW of electric power. It discharges waste heat to a river at \(30^{\circ} \mathrm{C} .\) The plant's overall efficiency is \(28 \% .\) (a) How does this efficiency compare with the maximum possible at these temperatures? (b) Find the rate of waste-heat discharge to the river. (c) How many houses, each requiring \(18 \mathrm{kW}\) of heating power, could be heated with the waste heat from this plant?

Find an expression for the entropy gain when hot and cold water are irreversibly mixed. A corresponding reversible process you can use to calculate this change is to bring each water sample slowly to their common final temperature \(T_{\mathrm{f}}\) and then mix them. Express your answer in terms of the initial temperatures \(T_{\mathrm{h}}\) and \(T_{\mathrm{c}} .\) Assume equal masses of hot and cold water, with constant specific heat \(c .\) What's the sign of your answer?

The temperature of \(n\) moles of ideal gas is changed from \(T_{1}\) to \(T_{2}\) with pressure held constant. Show that the corresponding entropy change is \(\Delta S=n C_{p} \ln \left(T_{2} / T_{1}\right)\).

Should a car get better mileage in the summer or the winter? Explain.

An object's heat capacity is inversely proportional to its absolute temperature: \(C=C_{0}\left(T_{0} / T\right),\) where \(C_{0}\) and \(T_{0}\) are constants. Find the entropy change when the object is heated from \(T_{0}\) to \(T_{1}\).
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