Thermal Growth
Engineering and technical people often use technical phrases that sound complicated. Thermal growth is one of those terms. It sounds like it could be an engineering marvel – one that would help us perform complicated alignments of high temperature, high speed machines. So, here’s the “secret” of thermal growth.
When metal gets hotter, it gets bigger.
Just how big is based on three things:
(What it is) The coefficient of linear thermal expansion, C
(How hot it gets) The differential temperature of the material being heated, ∆T
(How tall it is) The linear dimension of the material being calculated, L
It is calculated using the following formula:
C x ∆T x L = amount of thermal growth