Required Practical: Investigating Infrared Radiation

A LESLIE CUBE is a device used to explore the principles of thermal energy and emission of INFRARED RADIATION.

It's a hollow, watertight cube typically made of metal with different surfaces on each side, such as MATTE BLACK paint, MATTE WHITE paint, SHINY SILVER, and SHINY BLACK finishes. The varying surfaces allow us to investigate how different materials and textures emit infrared radiation differently.

In this practical experiment, we aim to understand how the surface material of an object affects the amount of INFRARED RADIATION it emits.

By comparing different surfaces, we can learn which materials are good emitters of infrared radiation and which are not.

Here’s how to conduct this experiment:

• Place a LESLIE CUBE on a heatproof mat.
• Boil water and carefully fill the cube with the boiling water.
• Allow the cube to warm up, then check that each side is at the same temperature with a THERMOMETER.
• Position an INFRARED DETECTOR at a fixed distance from one face of the cube and record the INFRARED RADIATION it detects.
• Do the same for each of the cube's faces, keeping the detector at the same distance each time.
• REPEAT the experiment to ensure reliability.

In your results, you'll find more INFRARED RADIATION from:

• the BLACK surface compared to the WHITE.
•  MATTE surfaces than SHINY ones.

This tells us that MATTE BLACK colours emit INFRARED RADIATION more than SHINY WHITE colours.