Essay on the resistance of a house brick

The first major problem faced in this experiment is heating the brick up to 800 degrees Celsius (considering that the ambient temperature is around 20 degrees Celsius. Bricks have a highly porous surface and this can be easily observed from the fact that all bricks soak more and more humidity as time passes. The brick hence has to be initially heated to a slow temperature of 50 degrees in order to remove all excess humidity from its porous; a standard laboratory torch can be used for this purpose. Heating directly all the way up to 800 degrees can result in structural damage to the brick due to the expansion of the humidity inside the porous.

Now, given the fact that the brick is very thick and has a low thermal conductivity a very intense heating source must be used to heat the brick up to 800 degrees as required. A closed oven can be used to achieve this aim by heating the brick up to more than 800 degrees. Since the oven is closed, it is obvious that no connection wires will be attached to the brick. All resistivity measurements can only thus take place once the brick is out of the oven and as it cools down. The rate at which the brick cools down will be initially quite high hence the relative measurements must be carried out swiftly. As the temperature though approaches the ambient temperature, this rate will of course become smaller and smaller.

The temperature of the brick can be measured using an instrument commonly found in labs called thermocouple. The thermocouple is essentially a two tipped probe; each tip is made of different metals and the temperature difference sensed by the two tips results in current flow which is translated to the material’s actual temperature…

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Tags: heat, house brick, resistance, structural damage, temperature

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