Originally Posted by
fuzz2050
I'm going to disagree with your metric here; the fact that the energy spent heating the food is higher than the energy spent heating the pan doesn't matter. The pans should be compared to one another, rather than the food.
By my quick math, your standard titanium mug weighs something like 3 ounces, my nine inch enameled cast iron skillet weighs 60 ounces. The heat capacity of cast iron and titanium are pretty similar (per gram), so the cast iron skillet would take 20 times the fuel to heat up.
That is a massive amount of fuel that is more or less wasted.
You are mostly correct but you aren't taking into account the thermal conductivity of the metal as mentioned by Carbonfiberboy in post #22. The heat capacity of aluminum is actually higher than that of cast iron or titanium. That means that it takes more energy to heat up an equivalent amount of aluminum than cast iron or titanium. However, the thermal conductivity, i.e. the heat that can get through the metal, is much higher for aluminum and somewhat higher for cast iron. But the thermal conductivity of titanium is appallingly low. Essentially, like cast iron (only worse), the heat poured into pan doesn't get
through the pan to do the work and you waste even more fuel.