CS 111 Assignment 1: Scaling and Dimensional Analysis

One of the perennial questions that arises around middle of November in the US is: what is
the best way to cook a Thanksgiving turkey? Well use the tools of dimensional analysis to
answer this!

First well re-interpret the question somewhat, turning it into the question of what is the
relation between the time you should cook the turkey for and the size of the turkey (by
which we will mean the mass of the turkey). The Betty Crocker cookbook states that you
should heat the oven to 400 F and then cook the turkey for one hour for each pound. Thus,
Ms. Crocker claims that a linear scaling law t M is the optimal rule.

Lets start off by asking what this time should depend on. Clearly it should depend on the
temperature of the oven, (or more carefully the amount of energy per unit volume sent
into the bird), the mass M of the turkey (or once again more carefully, the mass density of
the turkey , with dimensions of mass per unit volume, as well some measure l of its size,
such as its diameter). Finally, we need some measure of heat conduction within the turkey;
this is the thermal conductivity which has dimensions [] = L2 T 1 .

1. If t denotes the cooking time, starting

 2  from t = f (l, , , ), use the Pi theorem to arrive
2
at the functional form t = l F l
2 (Hint: Look for the dimensionless combinations
by considering the product ta b c d le and choosing the powers so that the length, mass
and time dimensions of this combination are all zero).

2. Now we make the following assumptions:

the temperature of the oven is be fixed, and

the thermal conductivity and density of turkeys are pretty much fixed.

Discuss the validity of these assumptions and what would happen to our model if either
of these assumptions failed to be valid.

3. Show that we can transform the previous functional form into

t = M 2/3 F (M 2/3 ),
where M is the turkeys mass and we have absorbed proportionality constants into the
function F (Hint: the density is fixed and the volume is proportional to l3 .)

4. Show that starting from t = f (l, , , ), we could have also obtained

r  r 

t=l G ,
l

1
 M: weight lbs 5 6 10 12 15 20 25 30
t: time hours 2 2.5 3.4 3.5 4.5 5.4 5.8 7
Table 1: Cooking times versus weights

Then show that if we again take , T, to be constant, we find that t = M 1/3 G(M 1/3 ).

5. The functions F , G are unknown, but lets make some simple assumptions about
them. The simplest assumption is that they are just constants. Thus, we have to
choose between t M 2/3 and t M 1/3 . At this point we need extra information.
Luckily, we have a compendium of cooking times and turkey weights for the tastiest
turkeys! Use the data in the table and whatever fitting procedure you care to use
(though you have to explain it carefully) to compare to our possible solutions to the
cooking time problem.
Plot the data together with your best fit to it.

6. (Optional) How would you set up a Taylor expansion for the functions F , G and use
it to perhaps get a better fit? What would your measure of a better fit be?