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Temperature of a sphere heating up in the sun (average emissivity of the sphere unknown)

Physics Asked by Keno on September 16, 2020

I’m stuck at the following exercise:

Imagine an aluminum sphere that is painted matte white with an
emissivity of $epsilon=0.10$ at visible wavelengths and
$epsilon=0.95$ at wavelengths longer than $5text{ }mutext{m}$.
This sphere is orbiting the sun receiving a power flux of
$R_{sun}=1330text{ Wm}^{-2}$. Find the steady-state temperature of
the sphere. Find the peak wavelength of the radiated energy and
determine which value of $epsilon$ should be used to calculate the
radiated energy.

Now first I realized that the sphere with Radius $r$ only receives the radiation of the sun on an area of $pi r^2$ while being able to emmit radiation over its whole area of $4pi r^2$. So the power flux emitted by the sphere should be a quarter of the power flux it receives:

$$R_{sphere}=332.5text{ Wm}^{-2}$$

I don’t get much further than that though. I woud like to continue calculating the temperature, for example with $R=epsilon_{avg}sigma T^4$, but the average emissivity is dependent on the temperature and I don’t even know $epsilon$ for most wavelengths, so that’s not really an option. The only other relevant equation that I know is Planck’s law:

$$frac{dR}{dlambda}=frac{2pi hc^2}{lambda^5}frac{epsilon}{exp(hc/klambda T)-1}$$

But $epsilon$ is only given for visible light and wavelengths longer than 5 micrometers. I thought about approximating the gap between those with a linear function like this:

$$epsilon=left{begin{matrix}0.1&0<lambda<750nm.2lambda/mu m-0.05&750nm<lambda<5mu m.95&5mu m<lambdaend{matrix}right.$$

but even with that I don’t know how I could use Planck’s law to calculate the temperature. Any ideas are greatly appreciated.

One Answer

I think the idea is that there is very little overlap in wavelength between the Sun's and the sphere's radiation curves (maybe you need to provide an argument for this), so you can treat them separately. You need to equate (taking account of the factor of four) $R=epsilon_{avg}sigma T^4$ for the Sun's temperature and the optical emissivity and for the sphere's (unknown) temperature and infrared emissivity .

Answered by Keith McClary on September 16, 2020

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