Having just endured an hour long elementary school program in a hot auditorium, I began to wonder about fanning oneself in an attempt to cool off.
Does folding a 8.5 x 11" piece of paper into the traditional fan shape help? It seems to add structural stability and allows you to fan faster but is that better than the presumably higher volume of airflow that one could achieve if the paper were left in its full size?
Is it even possible to cool yourself off by fanning? Sure, it feels good on your face but is the additional effort required to generate the wind counterproductive? I assume that you burn more calories and thus actually generate more heat by fanning. In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics.
I had another one but can’t think of it, so Hi Opal!
If the 8.5x11 flat sheet is too flimsy to bear fanning loads, then it’s probably not valid to presume that you can move more air with it unfolded than with it folded.
There’s nothing in the thermo laws that says it’s impossible to cool yourself off by active means. Refrigerators and air-conditioners do this all the time. As far as fanning yourself is concerned, the chemical energy wasted as muscular heat by a breeze-generating flick-of-the-wrist has no constraining relationship with the amount of heat removed from your body by the breeze so generated; either quantity may be larger than the other.
Since evaporative cooling is a very efficient process, I’d think it was entirely possible to cool yourself actively. A small wrist movement can move a lot of air over a large surface area. A good comparison is a car engine, which cools itself with a fan, even though it burns fuel to do that.
In elementary school the [del]crypt-keepers[/del] teachers would tell us not to fan ourselves because it was actually making us warmer. I think they were annoyed by the fanning, or just plain mean.
So it looks like the correct answer to #2 is, it depends. Unfortunately, the graphs referenced in the article are dead links so it’s hard to tell where the break even points are. I’ll report this post and maybe someone will be able to find them.
Have you actually tried to fan you self with a 8.5x11 sheet of paper? It works fine. A slight curve in the paper is enough to allow you to fan yourself.
And it’s effective: your head/face are exposed to the moving air, not covered with clothing like other parts of your body, and the head has proportionally more blood circulation, so more cooling can take place.
So you’ve got 30 kids. A couple want to fan themselves. Okay. Then they all want to fan themselves. Then they fan each other. Then they drop the fans. Then they poke each other with the fans. And I’m trying to teach the Assiciative Property of Multiplication. Yes, annoying.
However, since I had a straw fan to fan myself, as longas they could do it reasonably quietly I didn’t care.
