Wendy
The purpose of my experiment was to compare insulating abilities of several different fabrics that are used to make clothing. I used six articles of clothing, each made of a different fabric. The samples were hide, wool, cotton, polyester, acrylic and cashmere. I researched the cell structures of each of these materials and the proteins and such that they were made of. To test how well each fabric insulated, I blew hot air onto one side of the fabric with a hair drier and measured the temperature on the other side of the fabric. For each of the six fabrics, I blew hot air on the low heat setting for twenty seconds, timed with a stopwatch. After each trial was done, I repeated the process but this time for forty seconds. Then I repeated it another time for twenty seconds again, but this time using the high heat setting on the hair drier. In a data table, I calculated the change in temperature per second for each fabric. Then I compared the results.
Hide insulated best, hands down. It was the most dense of all materials and had virtually no pores. Another noticeable result is that wool and acrylic insulated much better in low heat trials than in high heat ones. The conclusion I came to is that the samples I used all had different tightness of weave, and that had to do with their insulation in the experiment. Both wool and acrylic samples were loosely knit and had many holes. When air is blown with force against a fabric, the air molecules can simply pass through the holes without losing heat. This statement is proven in the case of the hide, which had not visible holes at all and insulated the best. Thus the experiment proves to be fallible because rather than measuring the ability of the material to slow down air molecules, it really measured fabrics ability to block air molecules instead of letting them pass through holes untouched.