Hurricanes And Beer Cans: Study Puts Importance Of Latent Energy From Condensation In Layman's Terms [VIDEO]

Most people are familiar with latent heat in the form of sweat: as the environment uses the heat from a person’s body in order to evaporate the sweat, the individual’s body cools down.

But what about the reverse?

To help people become more familiar with the other side of this phenomenon, University of Washington Professors Dale R. Durran and Dargan M. W. Frierson teamed up with students to investigate the warming of cold drinks as water condenses on the outside of an aluminum can.

A beer, for example, cools down faster on a hot humid day when compared to a dry one as condensation forms on the can, consequently transmitting its energy into the drink.

Suppose a person has a drink in a 12-fluid-oz aluminum can upon which a layer of condensed water forms a layer 0.1 millimeters thick. From here, the researchers explain, estimating the upper limit for the temperature rise produced by condensation during a period of time is easy, assuming that the drink is mostly water.

The average surface area of the can, not including the bottom, is 290 centimeters squared, which would imply 2.9 grams of condensation. Knowing that the latent heat condensation for water near 0 degrees Celsius is 600 cal/g, the teams then estimated that if all the latent heat of condensation transferred to the 350 grams of water inside a 12-oz can, the average water temperature would rise 4.9 degrees Celsius.

Ultimately, however, the effect of latent heat exchanges goes much farther than the cooling of a beer can.

“Condensation as a heat source is just tremendously important,” Frierson told NBC News. “It’s really like the gasoline that powers hurricanes, thunderstorms and tornadoes.”

According to the study, the globally averaged absorption of outgoing IR radiation exceeds that from all other greenhouse gases combined.

“Yet water’s role in energy transfer is secondary to an even more important process: Precipitation is crucial for human civilization and most terrestrial life,” the researchers wrote. “Not surprisingly, the study of water in earths’ atmosphere continues to be one of the main challenges in atmospheric science.”