There's a simple differential equation often taught in intro calc courses, "Newton's Law of Cooling/Heating," which basically says that the rate of heat loss is proportional to the difference in temperature between a substance and its environment. I'm curious what that'd look like here. It's a very simple model, of course, not taking into account all the variables that Dynomight points out, but if a simple model can be nearly as predictive as more complex models...
I'm also curious to see the details of the models that Dynomight's LLMs produced!
It looks like a lot of them are missing something big. I'd think the two big ones are the evaporative cooling as you pour into the cup, and heating up the cup (by convection) itself. The convective cooling to the air is tertiary, but important (and conduction of the mug to the table probably isn't completely negligible). If there's only one exponential, they're definitely doing something wrong.
I'd like to see a sensitivity study to see how much those terms would need to be changed to match within a few %. Exponentials are really tweaky!
It does? There is a fast drop followed by a long decay, exponential in fact. The cooling rate is proportional to the temperature difference, so the drop is sharpest at the very beginning when the object is hottest.
The water temperature drops quickly because the room temperature ceramic mug is getting heated to near equilibrium with the water. If you used a vacuum sealed mug(thermos) then the water temp would drop a bit but not much at all initially.
It isn't that surprising that it works well, this problem is fairly well known and some simple heat equations would lead to the result, about which there is a lot of training data online.
There's a simple differential equation often taught in intro calc courses, "Newton's Law of Cooling/Heating," which basically says that the rate of heat loss is proportional to the difference in temperature between a substance and its environment. I'm curious what that'd look like here. It's a very simple model, of course, not taking into account all the variables that Dynomight points out, but if a simple model can be nearly as predictive as more complex models...
I'm also curious to see the details of the models that Dynomight's LLMs produced!
The appendix lists the equations transcribed from the raw answers.
It looks like a lot of them are missing something big. I'd think the two big ones are the evaporative cooling as you pour into the cup, and heating up the cup (by convection) itself. The convective cooling to the air is tertiary, but important (and conduction of the mug to the table probably isn't completely negligible). If there's only one exponential, they're definitely doing something wrong.
I'd like to see a sensitivity study to see how much those terms would need to be changed to match within a few %. Exponentials are really tweaky!
That model doesn't explain the relatively sharp drop in the beginning.
Are you sure? I believe Newtown's law of cooling says the temperature will drop sharply at the beginning:
dT/dt = -k(T_0 - T_room)
so T(t) = T_room + (T_0 - T_room) exp(-kt)
exp(-x) has a fast drop off then levels off.
It does? There is a fast drop followed by a long decay, exponential in fact. The cooling rate is proportional to the temperature difference, so the drop is sharpest at the very beginning when the object is hottest.
I mean that initial drop doesn't look like it is part of the same exponential decay.
The water temperature drops quickly because the room temperature ceramic mug is getting heated to near equilibrium with the water. If you used a vacuum sealed mug(thermos) then the water temp would drop a bit but not much at all initially.
It isn't that surprising that it works well, this problem is fairly well known and some simple heat equations would lead to the result, about which there is a lot of training data online.
... and so another benchmark is born.