In hot climates, compared with wooden buildings, adobe buildings offer significant advantages due to their greater thermal mass, but they are known to be particularly susceptible to earthquake damage.

In tropical and other climates typified by hot days and cool nights, the high thermal mass of adobe levels out the heat transfer through the wall to the living space.

* Building With Awareness A detailed how-to DVD video that shows adobe wall construction and their use as thermal mass walls

This makes a wall that has large amounts of thermal mass ( see earth sheltering ).

Most autonomous buildings are designed to use insulation, thermal mass and passive solar heating and cooling.

The basic requirement for passive solar heating is that the solar collectors must face the prevailing sunlight ( south in the northern hemisphere, north in the southern hemisphere ), and the building must incorporate thermal mass to keep it warm in the night.

It uses the ground beneath a building for thermal mass.

For example, for about a 15 % premium in building costs, the Passivhaus building codes in Europe use high performance insulating windows, R-30 insulation, HRV ventilation, and a small thermal mass.

If a small heater is available for the coldest nights, a slab or basement cistern can inexpensively provide the required thermal mass.

Annualized geo solar buildings often have buried, sloped water-tight skirts of insulation that extend from the foundations, to prevent heat leakage between the earth used as thermal mass, and the surface.

Another trick is to cool the building's thermal mass at night, and then cool the building from the thermal mass during the day.

It helps to be able to route cold air from a sky-facing radiator ( perhaps an air heating solar collector with an alternate purpose ) or evaporative cooler directly through the thermal mass.

As concrete has a high thermal mass and very low permeability, it can make for energy efficient housing.

The thermal mass properties of concrete increase the efficiency of both residential and commercial buildings.

By storing and releasing the energy needed for heating or cooling, concrete's thermal mass delivers year-round benefits by reducing temperature swings inside and minimizing heating and cooling costs.

While insulation reduces energy loss through the building envelope, thermal mass uses walls to store and release energy.

Modern concrete wall systems use both external insulation and thermal mass to create an energy-efficient building.

A high compression ratio is desirable because it allows an engine to extract more mechanical energy from a given mass of air-fuel mixture due to its higher thermal efficiency.

Reduction in recoil can also be achieved through mass attenuation of the thermal sleeve.

Because of helium's relatively low molar ( atomic ) mass, its thermal conductivity, specific heat, and sound speed in the gas phase are all greater than any other gas except hydrogen.

Due to the low molecular mass and hence high thermal velocity of hydrogen these engines are at least twice as fuel efficient as chemical engines, even after including the weight of the reactor.

If the pressure in a system remains constant ( isobaric ), a vapor at saturation temperature will begin to condense into its liquid phase as thermal energy ( heat ) is removed.

The system may be worked upon by an external force, and in the process, it can transfer thermal energy from a cooler system to a warmer one, thereby acting as a refrigerator or heat pump rather than a heat engine.

Entropy is a thermodynamic property that is the measure of a system ’ s thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work.

Therefore, the change in enthalpy can be devised or represented without the need for compressive or expansive mechanics ; for a simple system, with a constant number of particles, the difference in enthalpy is the maximum amount of thermal energy derivable from a thermodynamic process in which the pressure is held constant.

* 2002 – NASA's Mars Odyssey space probe begins to map the surface of Mars using its thermal emission imaging system.

In thermodynamics, a heat engine is a system that performs the conversion of heat or thermal energy to mechanical work.

That thermal stability comes at a price since an automatic regulation system requires additional energy.

When heat is added to a thermal system, the change in entropy is the increase in mass-energy divided by temperature:

The potential is then used to derive the thermodynamic properties of the system assuming thermal equilibrium.

A secondary drawback is that a high flow system that relies on the flow rate to protect the lubricant from thermal stress is susceptible to catastrophic failure during sudden system shut downs.

Applications range from structural elements such as steel-reinforced concrete, to the thermally insulative tiles which play a key and integral role in NASA's Space Shuttle thermal protection system which is used to protect the surface of the shuttle from the heat of re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

Techniques to do this include the process of sputtering, in which an ion beam liberates atoms from a target, allowing them to move through the intervening space and deposit on the desired substrate, and Evaporation ( deposition ), in which a material is evaporated from a target using either heat ( thermal evaporation ) or an electron beam ( e-beam evaporation ) in a vacuum system.

Aneroid gauges are not dependent on the type of gas being measured, unlike thermal and ionization gauges, and are less likely to contaminate the system than hydrostatic gauges.

When in thermal equilibrium, then, it is seen that the lower energy state is more populated than the higher energy state, and this is the normal state of the system.

As T increases, the number of electrons in the high-energy state ( N < sub > 2 </ sub >) increases, but N < sub > 2 </ sub > never exceeds N < sub > 1 </ sub > for a system at thermal equilibrium ; rather, at infinite temperature, the populations N < sub > 2 </ sub > and N < sub > 1 </ sub > become equal.

In other words, a population inversion (< span style =" white-space: nowrap "> N < sub > 2 </ sub >/ N < sub > 1 </ sub > > 1 </ span >) can never exist for a system at thermal equilibrium.

Initially, the system of atoms is at thermal equilibrium, and the majority of the atoms will be in the ground state, i. e., N < sub > 1 </ sub > ≈ N, N < sub > 2 </ sub > ≈ N < sub > 3 </ sub > ≈ 0.

A similar system is used in natural gas sales in the United States: m ( or M ) for thousands and mm ( or MM ) for millions of British thermal units or therms, and in the oil industry, where ' MMbbl ' is the symbol for ' millions of barrels '.

Instead of a thermal protection system, its surface was primarily covered with simulated tiles made from polyurethane foam.

Columbia was originally scheduled to lift off in late 1979, however the launch date was delayed by problems with both the SSME components, as well as the thermal protection system ( TPS ).

Externally, Columbia was the first orbiter in the fleet whose surface was mostly covered with High & Low Temperature Reusable Surface Insulation ( HRSI / LRSI ) tiles as its main thermal protection system ( TPS ), with white silicone rubber-painted Nomex — known as Felt Reusable Surface Insulation ( FRSI ) blankets — in some areas on the wings, fuselage and Payload Bay Doors.

Despite refinements to the launcher's thermal protection system and other enhancements, Columbia would never weigh as little unloaded as the other orbiters in the fleet.