Talking with someone and they had me doubting what I thought I knew.
For simplicity, take a bottle of water. If it were in a controlled room at 33 degrees, is it possible to freeze it with additional air movement alone? Like a 33 degree 100mph wind tunnel?
My belief was no. To think of moving air not as cooling, but as helping heat escape. So in the wind tunnel example, it would just get to 33 degrees quicker, and then remain.
Comments
To my knowledge wind chill only affects living things
That being said the scenario you described has other factors like the potential for evaporation
>My belief was no. To think of moving air not as cooling, but as helping heat escape
This is correct. 33 degree air will not freeze water regardless of how fast the air is moving around it. It just speeds heat transfer as a local warm pocket of air can’t form around it to slow down the freezing process.
Living creatures intentionally create warm pockets of air around them using hair or fur to slow heat transfer and keep them warm longer. That’s why 33 degrees and windy feels colder to you than 30 degrees and no wind.
Even without wind, evaporative cooling can lower the temperature of a liquid.
Ejecting individual ‘higher speed’ molecules from a cryogenic sample is one method of approaching absolute zero and is if not exactly equivalent to evaporation on a surface with surface tension, is a basic-form of ‘energy being carried away from a sample by an ejected particle or particles.’
Here is a link which talks about using a vacuum pump to ‘vigorously’ evaporate a sample enough to cause freezing.
https://van.physics.illinois.edu/ask/listing/16346
Lowering the sample an entire degree centigrade below room temperature with wind might be a challenge.
Also, I’d defer to someone with a better understanding of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics to understand if at 100 mph friction heating and/or surface turbulence will change rate cooling, etc.
Could you have a 1 mm deep sample freeze but not a 10 cm deep container?
I lived on a lake for a while. If it was very cold and calm, the lake would freeze into a mile wide smooth sheet of glass. If you through a rock, it would sound like a crazy sci-fi laser blast as the *entire* surface was a very stiff drum head. "Pew … pew …. pew pew pi pi bzzz" as the time between bounces decreased.
But … if you had 100 mph winds? No way that lake surface is freezing. It may got ice build up around the edges but the wave action would prevent crystals that form in the middle of the lake from becoming much more than slush. Freezing moving liquids like in a ‘splash’ from a rock in water requires *very* rapid cooling.
Put, if the 100 mph wind is a very thin sample of just the right surface area? Hmmmm. 😉
A ton of very cool physics has come from surfaces only a few molecules thick or phenomenon that *only* happens along the surfaces of certain substances.
I remember thinking "What the heck is a quasi-particle? I can barely keep all the quantum particles in my head at once as it is."
A Quasi-particle is — loosely — a little like when fans do ‘the wave’ in a huge stadium. It’s a *collective* phenomenon which, when involving only a few atoms or a small region of atoms, can move or carry physical properties as a collective ‘single quantum entity’ with ‘particle-like’ properties.
I bring up quasi particles because your question involves a surface which is more physically accurately seen as a ‘boundary’ with special ‘boundary conditions’ like surface tension which makes the water *at* the surface behave differently than in the bulk.
When becoming more rigorous in your understanding of physics, keep an eye out for regions where two very different but dynamic behaviors meet. That is where calculations can go wrong, for one, but it is also where your *intuitive* understanding of a very specific area of physics can become much stronger.
Look up ‘triple point’ for a good research starting point.
I hope this gives you a perspective on how much *fun* it can be to start asking questions from as many angles as possible.
Wind speed only affects the speed in which the temperature changes that’s all , but the total temperature would still be the same which is essentially the temp of the wind itself
Now I don’t know how the following study that I’ll send would even be relevant anyways but I need to send it so I can justify the fact I was searching for the wrong goddamn topic but found something Interesting and now I need to share it here somehow as if it’s actually relevant , so don’t mind me if I do you can read "Mass balance analysis and calculation of wind effects on heat fluxes and water temperature in a large lake"
By Yuan Hui a, Zhenduo Zhu a*, Joseph F. Atkinson
People published in 2018 which absolutely has nothing to do with the topic in question lmao , although I believe maybe you can still use it ? It studies all the affects of wind on the temperature of large lakes and I am guessing what works for lakes could hypothetically work for smaller things? Idk but it can give you an idea of the relationship of wind with the temperature of water(probably not but I need to justify sending the paper lmao)
You are correct. For this reason, you can’t get frostbite unless the temp goes to 32 degrees F or below. No matter how much wind there is. You might get hypothermia faster but you can’t get frostbite unless them temp drops to freezing.
Highly Depends…
33°C is way too warm for water to just freeze with wind.
33°F … Is approximately 0.5°C
Water freezes at 0°C
So no, just wind alone won’t do it.
It’s possible to use the air movement to drop the air pressure, which in turn allows water to freeze.
You can look up the exact pressure in a phase diagram for water.
So water at 0.5°C can freeze at around 0.95 Bar/Atm
Depending on the amount of water it will take really long for it to freeze solid, you’ll need to bleed off around 333J/g which is the amount of energy in a moving baseball at 19m/s
… Per gram of water, just for the phase transition.
It will take around 10 minutes per gram of water