Sounds like a good question for Dr Karl! :) If you do some experimenting he'll probably give you a free book or something. He's on JJJ on thursdays at 11am. Let me know if you call up!
Hmm, I just discovered my beach towel in my cupboard, therefore it is not mine! In which case I think that you'll find that the wetness doesn't actually spread evenly across the towel, instead it tends to clump where you stuck your wet hair for example. In which case maybe it is a case of surface area to volume ratio, osmosis, and/or vascular!
I dunno. Okay, so you get definite patches of extreme wetness on a towel, so "pretty-much evenly" is probably wrong, but there still must be some moisture movement. Actually I tend to try my hair using several different patches of towel to head this problem off at the pass, as it were.
Hmm. As stibbons says, I think it's more to do with surface structure than size. While there's some capillary action through a towel, experience (and present experiment) suggests that it's not significant on the towel scale... and in fact the larger size should decrease evaporation efficiency, since evaporation rate is inversely related to the moisture content of the air, and air flowing over a larger towel is more saturated by the time it ends up on the other side.
But I think the far more important factor is the surface structure of the towel, and how well air flows over it. I would tend to say the opposite of stibbons, and suggest that a dense flat towel would dry more quickly than a fluffy towel, because in the latter the laminar airflow is broken by the nooks and crannies. My beach towels are certainly less fluffy than my bath towels, I don't know about yours.
Well I think the surface area probably is important, but yours and stibbons' arguments both sound convincing! Maybe I will have to do some experiments. My beach towel has a fluffy side, which I would say is approximately as fluffy as my bath towels, and a smooth side. But I only use the fluffy side.
This I think is right! But what is the best composition!
BTW Nicholas, I think it's not necessarily fluffiness because those camping towels we took with us to Scandinavia dried very quickly! And they weren't fluffy!
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But I think the far more important factor is the surface structure of the towel, and how well air flows over it. I would tend to say the opposite of stibbons, and suggest that a dense flat towel would dry more quickly than a fluffy towel, because in the latter the laminar airflow is broken by the nooks and crannies. My beach towels are certainly less fluffy than my bath towels, I don't know about yours.
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BTW Nicholas, I think it's not necessarily fluffiness because those camping towels we took with us to Scandinavia dried very quickly! And they weren't fluffy!
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