Showing posts with label busted. Show all posts
Showing posts with label busted. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Letting Air Out of Tires II

In a recent post I calculated how cold air coming out of bike tires should feel.  However, at the end of the post, I did note that there are competing explanations for why the air cools.  There's the approach I took, which is adiabatic cooling, but there's also something called the Joule-Thomson effect.  The Joule-Thomson effect has the interesting property that helium being let out of a bike tire would actually be warmer, which suggests an immediate way to test which effect is dominant.  We pressurize a bike tire with helium, and see if the valve gets cold or hot.  This is exactly what I did.