This is an absolutely standard problem in an undergraduate Heat Transfer course. Look for heating or cooling a block of material and thermal diffusivity. Take a look at most any decent text (Rosenow(?) & Choi, 'Heat, Mass, & Momentom Transfer') for example)
That said, the geometry of a ham makes a closed form solution more difficult, requiring numerical methods. -John ============ > As we are fairly off track here, let me relay a similar story. My mother > has been working with food all her professional life. A christmas > tradition here in Sweden is to have big lumps of ham from which you > carve slices. However, the damn thing needs to be cooked. If you do it > in the oven it dries out, if you only boil it you do not get that crisp > surface people want. You can do a bit of both. However, one year she > thought about cooking it in the microwave oven. She has no formal > training in thermodynamics and didn't really involve me in the thought > process, but she figured that if she ran the microwave for half an hour, > after wrapping the ham in microwave-grade plastic, just to avoid it to > dry out, and then just let it sit on the bench, then it would hit those > 70 degrees in the core after a while anyway. Sure thing, it did. Worked > like a charm. Perfectly cooked, juicy. What happends is that it takes > time for the heat-wave to reach the core, so even if she stopped > providing more heat the heat-wave was still in progress and just could > not be stopped. _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
