Measuring the Specific Heat of a Substance with a Calorimeter

Initializing live version
Download to Desktop

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System

Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.

A substance of mass with a temperature is submerged into a calorimeter with 600 g of water initially at 4 °C. After some time, the system reaches an equilibrium temperature that determines the specific heat of the substance. The heat lost by the substance is gained by the water. For accurate results, the system should be thermally insulated.

Contributed by: Enrique Zeleny (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA


Snapshots


Details

The equation to solve is , where and are the specific heats of the substance and water in cal/g °C units, and are the masses, and and are the absolute differences in temperature from the equilibrium temperature.

The area of the gray rectangle that represents the substance is proportional to its density.



Feedback (field required)
Email (field required) Name
Occupation Organization
Note: Your message & contact information may be shared with the author of any specific Demonstration for which you give feedback.
Send