Thermal Energy and Temperature

If you stick to SI units then you can treat the units as the same. In other words one watt for one second means one joule and you can use this with the specific heat content to calculate temperature. This table give you the specific heat content of air for given temperatures so if you know your starting temperature you can calculate the temperature rise.

http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/air-properties-d_156.html

I hope that helps.

Thanks for info on Air Properties !

Nic

Don't do that! I would hope than anyone interrested in thermodynamics would desire to have a fundamental understanding of what they are working with and therefore know why the equation(s) apply. Not by chance. (Certainly no offence to the other post, I'm just overly anal retentive about these things.)

Please learn about "Specific Heat": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_heat_capacity

So if you know the mass of your matieral in the system and its specific heat then you can calculate the ammount of energy required to raise the system X degrees, or in your case the change of temp given the ammount of energy transfered.

Please also read a little about heat transfer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_transfer

Please do not think of thermal energy at all like kinetic energy. Kinetic energy, as you probably know, is the energy stored by a moving mass. Tempurature does not have mass. Heat transfer does not have inertia, thermal energy will only move from high temp mass to low temp mass, unless more energy from outside the system is employed.

Not sure exactly where you want to go with this. If you have a loss in kW and a time duration, thermal energy is 3413 BTU/kwhr (English units in my case). This will definitely cause a temperature change, but the calculations to determine the equation are a differential equation if you want to determine the rate of temperature change. If you want to know the steady state final temperature, a good heat transfer book will show you how to set up a series of repeating equations for the "relaxation method", which you can do in Excel pretty easily. Finite Element Analysis programs can do this also.