Should You Wipe Off Your Sweat?
Should You Wipe Off Your Sweat? with tags physics, minutephysics, science
If you’re in scorching heat, or when your body is working hard and you’ve got hot, hot sweat all over, sticky and stifling - does wiping off the sweat help you cool off? Or is it better to leave it on?
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REFERENCES
Hyperphysics:
Engineering Toolbox Mollier Diagram:
Sweat Info
Other articles:
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CALCULATIONS
Typical adult human body surface area ~ 1.5-2 m^2
Evaporation rate at 25°C and 50% humidity, slight air movement (v~.5m/s) = .35kg/m^2/hr
So in these conditions, a sweat-covered human can expect to evaporate ~.5-.75 L of water in an hour (For higher humidity (60-70%) it goes to ~.37-.5 L of water/hr). That amounts to ~0.25-0.35mm of sweat (covering the whole body) evaporated in an hour, or 6 micrometers every minute.
BUT that assumes all of the energy came from the person. If some proportion of it came from the air (~1/3-1/2?) then the person is only cooled down partially.
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