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Heat Sinks for a Racing Drone

Grade 6 investigation: a drone club warms metal heat sinks with a small heater to see how energy, mass and type of metal affect temperature change.

Grade 6ScienceInteractive · Printable

Aligned toMS-PS3-4

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What’s included

Single worksheet
Auto-graded online
1 NGSS standard
Printable answer key
11 questions
Classroom-ready

Details

Format: Interactive · Printable
Grade: Grade 6
Subject: Science
Question types: Fill in the blank, Multiple choice, Circle the answer, Short answer

About this worksheet

What students practice

Students use trial data to describe how the energy transferred and the mass of a block affect its temperature change.
Students compare how different metals change temperature when they take in the same energy.

How to use

Go over the meaning of joules and watts in paragraph 2 first, then let students find the trials that test each variable before they answer.

Curriculum

NGSS standard covered

MS-PS3-4

Investigate how the energy transferred, the type of matter and its mass affect a change in temperature.

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Heat Sinks for a Racing Drone

Measure how energy, mass and type of metal change a block's temperature.

Part 1: The heater trials

Read the passage and the trial table. Use them to answer questions 1–6.

Keeping the Drone Cool

1The drone racing club at Fairmont Middle School flies small quadcopters through a course of gates in the gym. After a few races, Tobias Lindqvist noticed that the motor controller, a small circuit board that sends power to the four motors, felt hot when his drone landed. The club's adviser, Ms. Esperanza Quintero, explained that electronics give off thermal energy as they work. Many devices are fitted with a heat sink, a block of metal pressed against the hot part. The club wanted to choose a heat sink that would warm up as little as possible during a race.

2To test heat sinks safely, the club used a small electric heater pad instead of a real controller. The pad gives off 5 joules (J) of energy every second, so in 3 minutes (180 seconds) it gives off 900 J. Each test block was clamped to the pad and wrapped in foam so that almost all of the energy went into the block. Every block started at room temperature, 22 °C. A probe thermometer read the highest temperature of the block after the heater was switched off.

3The club changed one thing at a time: the type of metal (aluminum, copper or steel), the mass of the block, or how long the heater ran, which sets the energy given to the block. All the blocks had the same flat side touching the pad. Each trial was run twice, and the two results were always within 1 °C of each other, so the table shows the averages.