Why is air a poor conductor of heat?

Question

Today, I was reading an article How Thermoses Work It goes on to explain all three processes of heat transfer:

• Conduction
• Radiation
• Convection

In Convection, It states,

If it weren't for convection your soup would stay hot a lot longer, because it turns out that air is a pretty poor heat conductor.

What does it have to do with air being poor conductor for the soup to stay hot a lot longer?

In other words, if air were a good conductor of heat, would your soup stay hot for longer?

Answer 1

Well, the argument is not very well put:

Because the air is a bad conductor of heat the soup stays hot longer: only the first layer of air touching the soup gets hot fast, and heat is not transmitted efficiently to the bulk of air. Convection by continuously replacing the contacting layer of air increases the heat transfer to the bulk of air, so it cools the soup faster than if there were no convection. If air were a good conductor of heat, the soup would cool fast, as in a metal plate on a metal surface.

You could go through a read of the wiki article.

Edit: Georg's comment makes me add that of course the soup would be also cooling because it will be radiating with the corresponding to its temperature black body spectrum. Convection increases the rate of heat loss over the loss through radiation.

Answer 2

Thermal conductivity in the linear regime (i.e. no convection) is determined by the rate of energy transfer by diffusion of molecules from the hot regime (high average kinetic energy) to the cold regime (low average kinetic energy). This rate is proportional to the density of molecules, the mean velocity, the mean free path, and the specific heat per particle, kappa\sim n c_p v l. This might suggest that the heat conductivity of a metal is larger because the density is bigger. This is not true, because the mean free path goes inversely as density, l \sim 1/(n\sigma), where \sigma is the scattering cross section. The main reason that metals are good conductors is that the velocity of electrons in a metal is much bigger than the velocity of air molecules (because electrons are lighter, and because at low T the electron velocity at the Fermi surface is still large because of the Pauli principle).

Answer 3

Air is a bad conductor because, to conduct heat current molecules should absorb heat and transmit it to neighbor by vibrating. In case of air molecules near the hot surface absorbs the heat and start vibrating, but neighbor molecule is so far that this vibration should be very high and so the heat energy required is high for small conduction to start.

Convection helps air in conduction by making molecules in air mobile so that the transfer of heat is not solely depend on the vibration of molecule, but another (or that molecule itself) can travel to transfer heat.

So , "If air were a good conductor of heat" then soup will not stay hot for longer because this time convection+conduction will both help to transfer heat away from soup.