Basically title, you always hear “windchill only affects humans” but we use fans to cool things all the time?
In: Physics
Okay so technically it affects everything that’s warmer than the ambient temperature. Here’s how it works. If a random object (say a water tank) is in 10F weather, it will cool down to the ambient temperature and then stay that way, regardless of windchill. But humans generate heat and have to maintain a certain internal temp to survive. This is where windchill comes in. It doesn’t make it colder. But it makes warmer objects lose heat quicker. Basically heat is coming off the surface of your skin and if there’s wind, it wicks the heat off your skin faster. So in cold weather, your body is constantly trying to maintain temperature and the rate at which you lose temperature depends both on the ambient temp, and how fast wind is blowing heat of your skin, which is why the wind-chill makes it “feel like” a different temp. So for example, it’s 40F but feels like 20. That means the wind is such that you are losing heat at the same rate you would if it was 20 outside with no wind.
So back to our tank of water. If you put a warm tank of water outside, it would cool off faster with wind chill but it will eventually end up at the ambient temperature regardless of wind.
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