How do blankets keep you warm?
In: Physics
Blankets and clothes simply keep air that’s next to your body from moving away easily. Your body warms up the air, and it forms an insulating layer around your body.
Your body is producing heat all the time. What blankets do is trap that heat around you, so it doesn’t escape as easy.
Blankets are insulation. Your body produces heat and that heat escapes through your skin. If you want to keep warm, you trap that heat in by wearing thick clothing or by wrapping blankets around yourself. This keeps your waste body heat close to keep you warm. If you want to cool off, you wear lighter clothing or you use fans to blow away the waste heat, so cooler air surrounds you rather than baking in a bath of your own heat. For this reason, when the temperatures around you exceed your own body heat, fans stop cooling you off. You would be warming yourself up by using fans, as the fans start acting like heaters by blowing hot air onto you.
Latest Answers