Week 3: Thermal Characterisation

Closing Stage 1 with the thermal toolkit — sensible heat, latent heat of transition, and reading a calorimetry trace as a two-transition story.

8 March 2027

Outline#

• Recap: Modules 1–2 gave us mechanical measurements (moduli, flow curves). This lecture adds the thermal measurement toolkit those two didn’t need.
• Deriving sensible heat and latent heat of transition as two different costs — one raises temperature, the other pays for a change of state at essentially fixed temperature — before either is applied to food.
• Reading a schematic differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) trace for red-braised pork belly: a broad fat-melting peak and a narrower, larger collagen-denaturation peak, and what the area under each one means.
• Why a long simmer, not a hot flash, is what a slow, high-ΔH transition actually demands — setting up Module 8’s point that a transition also has its own rate, not just a temperature threshold.
• Closing Stage 1: by the end of this lecture the course has a shared vocabulary for what a material does mechanically and thermally, before Stage 2 asks why it does that.
• What to bring to Module 3: no new tools beyond Modules 1–2 — this lecture is the last new measurement concept before the course turns to structure.