Comment on the Marshall-Hoare-Henssge model for estimating the time since death

Abstract

Timewise temperature variations in objects that are undergoing unsteady heating or cooling is a commonly encountered problem in the thermal sciences. One particular area of application is the cooling of a body post-death and the use of body temperatures to estimate the time of death. Here, a new approach based on the theory of transient heat transfer is formulated to allow efficient calculation of unsteady conduction problems. The theoretically derived unsteady temperature models are compared with experimentally based correlations (the Marshall-Hoare-Henssge model). The two approaches are found to agree very well. With this new theoretically based approach, timewise temperature variation can be calculated for both large and small Biot number transient problems.