BTW, If one was already profoundly hypothermic, would it be unwise to fart?
Your a heat source but the fart is not. To any degree it has heat is from your body so you will cool as much as the fart is hot. So the fart will not increase the rooms temperature but your metabolic process is producing heat constantly causing you to heat the room constantly.
This is an interesting detail, but there is akready so much written here, and lots wrong, that giving an answer that really helps would be way too much effort.
But in real world terms it really does not matter at all and you would have a very hard time even measuring any sort of effect.
There must be a machine
We need a room calorimeter and a lot of beans.
Mine tend to lower the temp of the room when everyone else flees to escape the smell.
People are missing that the fart is under pressure in the body. Increasing the gas volume from your colon to the room while keeping the mass of gas the same will produce a drop in mean enthalpy due to the reduction in mean gas pressure.
yes, but, it’s already warmer than room temp being cooked in your colon. not sure if that evens things out…
Presumably the average temperature of the room pre fart Includes the gas in your colon.
negative, heat transfer will occur much faster in a mixing gas volume than between a solid object and a gas volume.
BTW, If one was already profoundly hypothermic, would it be unwise to fart?
Assuming the ambient air temperature is cold enough to induce hypothermia, farting is fine. Bringing cold air into the body is the problem. You’d be better off if you stopped breathing.
That last sentence i can’t help but read as a threat and it’s funny
Top comment is wrong: the short answer to the post title is a hard “yes” due to enthalpy of solvation. The process of fart mixing into ambient air generates heat.
The answer to your followup question would require some modeling — with the main factors being fart composition, body mass, thermal gradient, and room size.
What about liquid particles in the flatulence phase-changing and lowering the temperature? (Like how an evaporative swamp cooler works)
I didn’t take shartery into account, but that’s a great point.
Exactly, beside one techniallity:
The process of fart mixing into ambient air generates heat.
No, it does not generate heat. It carries a portion of heat from the body and transports it into the ambient air in the room. Almost simultaneously, an equivalent amount of air leaves the room to the outside. The increased heat of the air yields into an increased temperature in the room.
Is it any different from hot air exhaled from your lungs?
The act of mixing fart into air is an exothermic process that does in fact explicitly generate heat. You can read up here if curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthalpy_change_of_solution
Granted, it’s not intuitive without getting deep into the weeds of thermodynamics, but when different molecules that are attracted to one another get mixed, that combined form is a state with lower chemical potential energy than the original substances would have if left separate. I.e. you’d need to invest energy to break up the intermolecular attractions if you wanted to re-separate the molecules. The potential energy “lost” in the process of mixing is extruded in the form of heat.
I have a degree in physics and work in biomed R&D. I am a qualified fart scientist — this is what I live for.
But isn’t there some contribution from the delta in pressure?
Yeah, you’re right — there would be some cooling from pressure release.
I might need to do some math tonight.
Qualifies mixing of gases as dissolution?
The energy change can be regarded as being made up of three parts: the endothermic breaking of bonds within the solute and within the solvent, and the formation of attractions between the solute and the solvent.
Does not sound like mixing of gases. No bonds are broken. No bonds are formed. Just (almost) free molecules moving around.
As my profession is solid mechanics, mixing of fluids is not my field of expertise.
In a nutshell, the bonds in question are intermolecular forces, not bonds between atoms within a molecule.
Still not a solution.
Care to elaborate on your stance?
No no, dissolution does generate (sometimes negative) heat. It’s called heat of solvation and it exists because when something dissolves it breaks solute-solute bonds, requiring energy, but then forms solute-solvent bonds, releasing energy. This difference can either result in the solution becoming hotter or colder than its components.
This is not happening here. There is no solution, everything is a gas.
Yeah solutions can have any phase of solute and any phase of solvent. The most common example of a solution of gases is the air, so yeah.
Heat doesn’t come from nowhere. If a fart increases the temperature of the room, then it must decrease the temperature of the body it escaped from.
So, if you’re freezing, you should hold on to those little hugs of warmth as long as possible.
Expelling gas removes that bit of thermal energy (heat) from your system, but it shouldn’t alter your temperature in any way. Next, the warm gas mixes with air. The new gas mixture will have more heat than it had before, which will increase its average temperature a little bit. Probably not an easily measurable effect.
As i supecter
The fart doesn’t decrease the body temperature, but it does (marginally) reduce your body mass, and therefore your body’s capacity to “carry” heat. If you’re hypothermic, your fart will most likely still be body temperature, as your core temperature remains at the correct temperature as long as possible, even sacrificing other areas if necessary.
If you’re hypothermic to the point where your fart is cold, it might be beneficial to let one rip if you’re entering a warmer area, so that your body no longer has to heat up the gas as well. If you’re somewhere cold, the fart probably won’t make a difference.
No. Heat is defined as average kenetic energy. It doesn’t make a difference if that heat is in the atmosphere in a room, or in the body of a person in that room.
not sure I agree. the heat contained in the body is warmer than room temp; transferring a portion of that heat out of the colon and diffusing it around the room has to bring the room’s temp up faster than the warm body (farter) transfers heat into the ambient room temp.
If OP meant atmosphere temperature they should have said that.
by atmosphere I mean the local atmosphere, they’re asking for the temperature of the room.
The room contains everything in it. The walls give off radiation just as humans do.
They were part of you that was already at a constant temperature. It would distribute the heat quicker but the overall heat transfer is the same.
One factor that changes this is that because your body maintains a constant temperature, releasing heat faster would cause your body to generate more heat to compensate.
