transfer of internal energy within a body due to particle collisions & electron movements
Thermal conduction is the process by which heat moves through a material when particles and electrons collide with each other, transferring energy from hotter to cooler regions. It matters because understanding how heat spreads through different materials helps us design better insulation, cookware, electronics, and countless other products we use every day.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
Thermal conduction is the diffusion of thermal energy (heat) within one material or between materials in contact. The higher temperature object has molecules with more kinetic energy; collisions between molecules distributes this kinetic energy until an object has the same kinetic energy throughout. Thermal conductivity, represented by k, is a property that relates the rate of heat loss per unit area to its rate of change of temperature. It accounts for any property that could change the way a material conducts heat. Heat spontaneously flows along a temperature gradient (i.e. from a hotter body to a colder body). For example, heat is conducted from the hotplate of an electric stove to the bottom of a saucepan in contact with it. In the absence of an opposing external driving energy source within a body or between bodies, temperature differences decay over time, and thermal equilibrium is approached.
Every process involving heat transfer takes place by one of three methods:
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).