Now let’s take explore how, even though heat can move from one object to another, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the temperature of the objects will change. You may ask, “What? Heat can move from one object to another without temperature changing one little bit?!?!” We’re going to take a look at one of the ways heat can move while the thermometer doesn’t.

When things change phase (change from solid to liquid or liquid to gas or… well, you get the picture) the temperature of those objects don’t change. If you were able to take the temperature of water as it changed from a solid (ice) to a liquid you would notice that the temperature of that piece of ice will stay at about 32° F until that piece of ice was completely melted. The temperature would not increase at all. Even if that ice was in an oven, the temperature would stay the same. Once all the solid ice had disappeared, then you would see the temperature of the puddle of water increase.

By the way, as the ice is melting, from where is heat being transferred? Heat is being transferred, by conduction, from the air.

One key distinction is that objects don’t contain heat, but they contain energy. Heat is the transfer of energy from from one object to another, or from one system to another, like a hot cup of coffee to the cool ambient air. Heat can change the temperature of objects when it transfers the energy. In the example with the coffee cup, it lowered the temperature of the coffee.

Imagine putting a sponge under a slowly running faucet. The sponge would continue to fill with water until it reached a certain point and then water started to drip from it. You could say that the sponge had a water capacity. It could hold so much water before it couldn’t hold any more and the water started dripping out.

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Heat capacity is how much heat an object can absorb before it increases in temperature. It’s often used interchangeably with “specific heat capacity”, but in reality it’s a little different.

Click here to go to next lesson on Specific Heat Capacity.

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Specific heat capacity is how much heat energy a mass of a material must absorb before it increases 1°C. It’s how much heat is needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of the material. Heat Capacity is how much heat is required to raise the temperature. The units of heat capacity are J per Kelvin, whereas for specific heat capacity, the units are J per (gram-K).

Each material has its own specific heat. The higher a material’s specific heat, the more heat it must absorb before it increases in temperature.  Water is unique in that it has a very large specific heat. Liquid water’s specific heat is over 4 which is very high. In comparison, granite is 0.8, aluminum is 0.9, rubbing alcohol is 2.4 and gold is 0.1.

To get the same amount of rubbing alcohol and liquid water to increase the same amount of temperature, you would need to pump about twice the amount of heat into the water. To get the same amount of gold and liquid water to increase the same amount of temperature, you would need to pump 40 times the amount of heat into the water!

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Click here to go to next lesson on Fire Water Balloon.

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If you’ve ever had a shot, you know how cold your arm feels when the nurse swipes it with a pad of alcohol. What happened there? Well, alcohol is a liquid with a fairly low boiling point. In other words, it goes from liquid to gas at a fairly low temperature. The heat from your body is more then enough to make the alcohol evaporate.

As the alcohol went from liquid to gas it sucked heat out of your body. For things to evaporate, they must suck in heat from their surroundings to change state. As the alcohol evaporated you felt cold where the alcohol was. This is because the alcohol was sucking the heat energy out of that part of your body (heat was being transferred by conduction) and causing that part of your body to decrease in temperature.

As things condense (go from gas to liquid state) the opposite happens. Things release heat as they change to a liquid state. The water gas that condenses on your mirror actually increases the temperature of that mirror. This is why steam can be quite dangerous. Not only is it hot to begin with, but if it condenses on your skin it releases even more heat which can give you severe burns. Objects absorb heat when they melt and evaporate/boil. Objects release heat when they freeze and condense.

Do you remember when I said that heat and temperature are two different things? Heat is energy – it is thermal energy. It can be transferred from one object to another by conduction, convection, and radiation. We’re now going to explore heat capacity and specific heat. Here’s what you do:

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You Need:

• Balloon
• Water
• Matches, candle, and adult help
• Sink

Download Student Worksheet & Exercises

1. Put the balloon under the faucet and fill the balloon with some water.

2. Now blow up the balloon and tie it, leaving the water in the balloon. You should have an inflated balloon with a tablespoon or two of water at the bottom of it.

3. Carefully light the match or candle and hold it under the part of the balloon where there is water.

4. Feel free to hold it there for a couple of seconds. You might want to do this over a sink or outside just in case!

So why didn’t the balloon pop? The water absorbed the heat! The water actually absorbed the heat coming from the match so that the rubber of the balloon couldn’t heat up enough to melt and pop the balloon. Water is very good at absorbing heat without increasing in temperature which is why it is used in car radiators and nuclear power plants. Whenever someone wants to keep something from getting too hot, they will often use water to absorb the heat.

Think of a dry sponge. Now imagine putting that sponge under a slowly running faucet. The sponge would continue to fill with water until it reached a certain point and then water started to drip from it. You could say that the sponge had a water capacity. It could hold so much water before it couldn’t hold any more and the water started dripping out. Heat capacity is similar. Heat capacity is how much heat an object can absorb before it increases in temperature. This is also referred to as specific heat. Specific heat is how much heat energy a mass of a material must absorb before it increases 1°C.

Exercises Answer the questions below:

1. What is specific heat?
   1. The specific amount of heat any object can hold
   2. The amount of energy required to raise the temperature of an object by 1 degree Celsius.
   3. The type of heat energy an object emits
   4. The speed of a compound’s molecules at room temperature
2. Name two types of heat energy:
3. What type (or types) of heat energy is at work in today’s experiment?
4. True or False: Water is poor at absorbing heat energy.
   1. True
   2. False

Click here to go to next lesson on How much energy does a candy bar have?

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How much energy does a candy bar have? How much energy does a candy bar have? If you flip it over and read the nutritional information on the back, you can figure it out with a little help from the video below:

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Click here to go to next lesson on Heat Flow.

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Let’s learn how to calculate the heat flow based solely on temperature readings from a thermometer (this is going to be important later in this lab):

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Click here to go to next lesson on Heat and States of Matter.

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Heat can also change the state of matter. When an ice cube melts into a liquid puddle, it remains at the same temperature until the phase change is complete, and only then does the temperature begin to rise, even though heat was added throughout the entire process. The thermometer reading will stay on the same temperature reading until the ice is completely melted.

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Click here to go to next lesson on Sublimation.

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Carbon dioxide goes straight from a solid to a gas, which is called “sublimation”. It totally skips going through the liquid phase! How do you handle the transition from a solid block to a gas cloud? Here’s how:

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Did you know that eating a single peanut will power your brain for 30 minutes? The energy in a peanut also produces a large amount of energy when burned in a flame, which can be used to boil water and measure energy.

Click here to go to next lesson on Heat Energy of a Peanut.

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This experiment is for advanced students. Did you know that eating a single peanut will power your brain for 30 minutes? The energy in a peanut also produces a large amount of energy when burned in a flame, which can be used to boil water and measure energy.

Peanuts are part of the bean family, and actually grows underground (not from trees like almonds or walnuts).  In addition to your lunchtime sandwich, peanuts are also used in woman’s cosmetics, certain plastics, paint dyes, and also when making nitroglycerin.

What makes up a peanut?  Inside you’ll find a lot of fats (most of them unsaturated) and  antioxidants (as much as found in berries).  And more than half of all the peanuts Americans eat are produced in Alabama. We’re going to learn how to release the energy inside a peanut and how to measure it.

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Materials:

• raw peanuts
• chemistry stand with glass test tube and holder (watch video)
• flameproof surface (large ceramic tile or cookie sheet)
• paper clip
• alcohol burner or candle with adult help
• fire extinguisher

Download Student Worksheet & Exercises

What’s Going On? There’s chemical energy stored inside a peanut, which gets transformed into heat energy when you ignite it. This heat flows to raise the water temperature, which you can measure with a thermometer.  You should find that your peanut contains 1500-2100 calories of energy!  Now don’t panic…  this isn’t the same as the number of calories you’re allowed to eat in a day.  The average person aims to eat around 2,000 Calories (with a capital “C”).  1 Calorie = 1,000 calories.  So each peanut contains 1.5-2.1 Calories of energy (the kind you eat in a day). Do you see the difference?

But wait… did all the energy from the peanut go straight to the water, or did it leak somewhere else, too?  The heat actually warmed up the nearby air, too, but we weren’t able to measure that. If you were a food scientist, you’d use a nifty little device known as a bomb calorimeter to measure calorie content.  It’s basically a well-insulated, well-sealed device that catches nearly all the energy and flows it to the water, so you get a much more accurate temperature reading. (Using a bomb calorimeter, you’d get 6.1-6.8 Calories of energy from one peanut!)

How do you calculate the calories from a peanut?

Let’s take an example measurement.  Suppose you measured a temperature increase from 20 °C to 100 °C for 10 grams of water, and boiled off 2 grams.  We need to break this problem down into two parts – the first part deals with the temperature increase, and the second deals with the water escaping as vapor.

The first basic heat equation is this:

Q = m c T

Q is the heat flow (in calories)
m is the mass of the water (in grams)
c is the specific heat of water (which is 1 degree per calorie per gram)
and T is the temperature change (in degrees)

So our equation becomes: Q = 10 * 1 * 80 = 800 calories.

If you measured that we boiled off 2 grams of water, your equation would look like this for heat energy:

Q = L m

L is the latent heat of vaporization of water (L= 540 calories per gram)
m is the mass of the water (in grams)

So our equation becomes: Q = 540 * 2 = 1080 calories.

The total energy needed is the sum of these two:

Q = 800 calories + 1080 calories = 1880 calories.

A peanut is not a nut, but actually a seed. In addition to containing protein, a peanut is rich in fats and carbohydrates. Fats and carbohydrates are the major sources of energy for plants and animals.

The energy contained in the peanut actually came from the sun. Green plants absorb solar energy and use it in photosynthesis. During photosynthesis, carbon dioxide and water are combined to make glucose. Glucose is a simple sugar that is a type of carbohydrate. Oxygen gas is also made during photosynthesis.

The glucose made during photosynthesis is used by plants to make other important chemical substances needed for living and growing. Some of the chemical substances made from glucose include fats, carbohydrates (such as various sugars, starch, and cellulose), and proteins.

Photosynthesis is the way in which green plants make their food, and ultimately, all the food available on earth. All animals and nongreen plants (such as fungi and bacteria) depend on the stored energy of green plants to live. Photosynthesis is the most important way animals obtain energy from the sun.

Oil squeezed from nuts and seeds is a potential source of fuel. In some parts of the world, oil squeezed from seeds-particularly sunflower seeds-is burned as a motor fuel in some farm equipment. In the United States, some people have modified diesel cars and trucks to run on vegetable oils.

Fuels from vegetable oils are particularly attractive because, unlike fossil fuels, these fuels are renewable. They come from plants that can be grown in a reasonable amount of time.
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Materials

• Shelled peanut
• Small pair of pliers
• Match or lighter
• Sink

Download Student Worksheet & Exercises

Procedure

ASK AN ADULT TO HELP YOU WITH THIS EXPERIMENT. DO NOT DO THIS EXPERIMENT BY YOURSELF. The fuel from the peanut can flare up and burn for a longer time than expected.

Close the drain in the kitchen sink. Fill the sink with water until the bottom of the sink is just covered.

Using a small pair of pliers, hold the peanut over the sink containing water. Ask an adult to hold the flame of a lit match or lighter directly under the peanut. When the peanut starts to burn, the lit match or lighter can be removed.

Allow the peanut to burn for one minute. MAKE SURE AN ADULT REMAINS PRESENT AND MAKE SURE TO HOLD THE PEANUT OVER THE SINK. To extinguish the burning peanut, drop it into the water. After you have extinguished the peanut, allow it to cool and then examine it carefully.

Observations

How long does it take for the peanut to start to burn? Does the peanut burn with a clean flame or a sooty flame? What color is the flame? What color does the peanut turn when it burns? Did the size of the peanut change after it has burned for several minutes?

Discussion

You should find that the peanut ignites and burns after a lit match or lighter is held under it for a few seconds. Although you only let the peanut burn for one minute as a safety measure, the peanut would burn for many minutes.

In this experiment, when the peanut burns, the stored energy in the fats and carbohydrates of the peanut is released as heat and light. When you eat peanuts, the stored energy in the fats and carbohydrates of the peanut is used to fuel your body.

Other Things to Try

Hold one end of a piece of uncooked spaghetti in a pair of pliers. Ask an adult to hold the flame of a lit match or lighter under the other end of the spaghetti. When the spaghetti starts to burn, place it in an aluminum pie pan that is in the sink. Make sure to extinguish the burning spaghetti with water when you are finished with the experiment. How does the burning of the spaghetti compare with the burning of the peanut?

Exercises 

1. What is the process called where plants get food from the sun?
   1. Osteoporosis
   2. Photosynthesis
   3. Chlorophyll
   4. Metamorphosis
2. Where does all life on the planet get its food?
3. List two ways that we could use the energy in a peanut:

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Click here to go to next lesson on Thermostat.

If you can remember thermostats before they went ‘digital’, then you may know about bi-metallic strips – a piece of material made from of two strips of different metals which expand at different rates as they are heated (usually steel and copper). The result is that the flat strip bends one way if heated, and in the opposite direction if cooled.

Normally, it takes serious skill and a red-hot torch to stick two different metals together, but here’s a homemade version of this concept that your kids can make using your freezer.  Here what you do:

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Materials:

• foil wrapper from a stick of gum or candy bar
• index card
• scissors
• tape

Since gum wrappers are paper on one side and foil on the other, you can use one to make your own bi-metallic strip. Flatten out the wrapper into a sheet and find a way fasten the wrapper so it sits upright on an index card (we used the bubble gum itself as the adhesive). Stick it in the freezer overnight and check it in the morning! Where can you place it to flex the other direction?

How does that work? A bimetallic strip is a stack of two metals stuck together. The metal with the higher expansion is on the outer side of the curve when the strip is heated and on the inner side when cooled. The bi-metallic strip was invented by the eighteenth century clockmaker John Harrison to compensate for temperature-induced changes his clock springs.

Click here to go to next lesson on Triple Point.

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The triple point is where a molecule can be in all three states of matter at the exact same time, all in equilibrium. Imagine having a glass of liquid water happily together with both ice cubes and steam bubbles inside, forever! The ice would never melt, the liquid water would remain the same temperature, and the steam would bubble up. In order to do this, you have to get the pressure and temperature just right, and it’s different for every molecule.

The triple point of mercury happens at -38^oF and 0.000000029 psi. For carbon dioxide, it’s 75psi and -70^oF. So this isn’t something you can do with a modified bike pump and a refrigerator.

However, the triple point of water is 32^oF and 0.089psi. The only place we’ve found this happening naturally (without any lab equipment) is on the surface of Mars.

Because of these numbers, we can get water to boil here on Earth while it stays at room temperature by changing the pressure using everyday materials. (If you have a vacuum pump, you can have the water boil at the freezing point of 32^oF.)

Here’s what you need to do:

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Materials:

• plastic syringe (no needle)
• room temperature water

Bonus Idea: Do this experiment first with water, then with carbonated water.

Why does that work? How did you get the pressure to decrease? Easy – when you pulled on the plunger and increased the volume inside the syringe. Since your finger covered the hole, no additional air was allowed in when you did this (which is why it was probably a little tough to do), so the number of molecules inside the syringe stayed the same, but the space they had to wiggle around got a lot bigger, meaning that the pressure decreased.

The air inside the syringe isn’t just plain old air… it has water vapor inside, too. And that’s not all – the water from your sink isn’t just plain old water, it has air bubbles mixed in with it. When you brought down the pressure (by pulling the plunger), you are forcing the air bubbles to come out of the water, which makes it boil. When you shove the plunger back in and increase the pressure, you’ll find that the air bubbles mix back into the water and disappears.

Did you try the soda water yet? Soda has carbon dioxide already mixed in for you, which is under pressure. You can release this pressure by opening the bottle (you’ll hear a PSSST!), which is the carbon dioxide bubbles coming out of the soda. Go ahead and try that now before reading further…

When you place the soda water into the syringe and decrease the pressure, the carbon dioxide comes out quickly Try tapping the syringe to make all the tiny bubbles combine into one larger bubble. When you increase the pressure (push the plunger back in), some of the bubbles will redissolve back into the soda.

If you’ve ever had a glass of hot water suddenly erupt in an explosion of bubbles, you’ve experienced superheated water (water that’s above it’s normal boiling point) that hasn’t been able to form bubbles yet. By adding a tea bag or simply just jiggling it around is usually enough to cause the bubbles to start, which often splatters HOT HOT water everywhere. (This isn’t something you want to try without adult help.)

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Click here to go to next lesson on Conduction.

In our example of the ice and the lemonade, it would work like this. The lemonade has a higher temperature than the ice. (The molecules are moving faster than the ice molecules.)

The faster moving molecules of the lemonade would transfer heat to the ice causing the ice molecules to move faster (increase temperature) and eventually change from solid to liquid.

In turn, since the faster moving molecules of the lemonade moves energy (transfers heat) to the ice, they slow down. This causes the temperature of your drink to decrease and that is what makes your lemonade nice and cold. Heat can be transferred in three different ways: conduction, convection and radiation.

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Let’s start with conduction. Heat is transferred through conduction the same way pool balls are scattered around a table in the opening break. On a pool table, one ball crashes into another ball which crashes into another ball speeding the balls up and moving them around the table.

Heat transferred from one object to another through conduction does the same thing. The molecules near the heat source (candle, stove, etc.) begin moving faster (their temperature increases).

Click here to go to next lesson on Convection.

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When something feels hot to you, the molecules in that something are moving very fast. When something feels cool to you, the molecules in that object aren’t moving quite so fast. Believe it or not, your body perceives how fast molecules are moving by how hot or cold something feels. Your body has a variety of antennae to detect energy. Your eyes perceive certain frequencies of electromagnetic waves as light. Your ears perceive certain frequencies of longitudinal waves as sound. Your skin, mouth and tongue can perceive thermal energy as hot or cold. What a magnificent energy sensing instrument you are!

Let’s find out how to watch the hot and cold currents in water. Here’s what you need to do:

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Materials:

• two bottles of water
• food coloring
• bathtub or sink
• index card or business card

You need:

Two empty bowls (or water bottles)
Food coloring
Hot water (Does not need to be boiling.)
Cold water

1. Put about the same amount of water into two bowls. One bowl should be filled with hot water from the tap. If you’re careful, you can put it in the microwave to heat it up but please don’t hurt yourself. The other bowl should have cold water in it. If you’re using water bottles, pour the hot and cold water into each bottle.

2. Let both bowls sit for a little bit (a minute or so) so that the water can come to rest.

3. Put food coloring in both bowls (or bottles) and watch carefully.

The food coloring should have spread around faster in the hot water bowl than in the cold water bowl. Can you see why? Remember that both bowls are filled with millions and millions of molecules. The food coloring is also bunches of molecules. Imagine that the molecules from the water and the molecules from the food coloring are crashing into one another like the beans on the plate. If one bowl has a higher temperature than the other, does one bowl have faster moving molecules? Yes, the higher temperature means a higher thermal energy. So the bowl with the warmer water has faster moving molecules which crash more and harder with the food coloring molecules, spreading them faster around the bowl.

If you’re using a bottle, you can do an extra step: For bottles, place a business card over the cold bottle and invert the cold bottle over the hot. Remove card.

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Click here to go to next lesson on Convection Currents.

Every time I’m served a hot bowl of soup or a cup of coffee with cream I love to sit and watch the convection currents. You may look a little silly staring at your soup but give it a try sometime!

Convection is a little more difficult to understand than conduction. Heat is transferred by convection by moving currents of a gas or a liquid. Hot air rises and cold air sinks. It turns out, that hot liquid rises and cold liquid sinks as well.

Room heaters generally work by convection. The heater heats up the air next to it which makes the air rise. As the air rises it pulls more air in to take its place which then heats up that air and makes it rise as well. As the air get close to the ceiling it may cool. The cooler air sinks to the ground and gets pulled back near the heat source. There it heats up again and rises back up.

This movement of heating and cooling air is convection and it can eventually heat an entire room or a pot of soup. This experiment should allow you to see convection currents.

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You need:

• A pot
• A stove with adult help
• Pepper
• Ice cubes
• Food Coloring (optional)

1. Fill the pot about half way with water.

2. Put about a teaspoon of pepper into the water.

3. Put the pot on the stove and turn on the stove (be careful please).

4. Watch as the water increases in temperature. You should see the pepper moving. The pepper is moving due to the convection currents. If you look carefully you many notice pepper rising and falling.

5. Put an ice cube into the water and see what happens. You should see the pepper at the top of the water move towards the ice cube and then sink to the bottom of the pot as it is carried by the convection currents.

6. Just for fun, put another ice cube into the water, but this time drop a bit of food coloring on the ice cube. You should see the food coloring sink quickly to the bottom and spread out as it is carried by the convection currents.

Did you see the convection currents? Hot water rising in some areas of the pot and cold water sinking in other areas of the pot carried the pepper and food coloring throughout the pot. This rising and sinking transferred heat through all the water causing the water in the pot to increase in temperature.

Heat was transferred from the flame of the stove to the water by convection. More accurately, heat was transferred from the flame of the stove to the metal of the pot by conduction and then from the metal of the pot throughout the water through convection.

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Click here to go to next lesson on Radiation.

Heat is transferred by radiation through electromagnetic waves. Remember, when we talked about waves and energy? Well, heat can be transferred by electromagnetic waves. Energy is vibrating particles that can move by waves over distances right? Well, if those vibrating particles hit something and cause those particles to vibrate (causing them to move faster/increasing their temperature) then heat is being transferred by waves. The type of electromagnetic waves that transfer heat are infra-red waves. The Sun transfers heat to the Earth through radiation.

If you hold your hand near (not touching) an incandescent light bulb until you can feel heat on your hand, you’ll be able to understand how light can travel like a wave. This type of heat transfer is called radiation.

Now don’t panic. This is not a bad kind of radiation like you get from x-rays. It’s infra-red radiation. Heat was transferred from the light bulb to your hand. The energy from the light bulb resonated the molecules in your hand. (Remember resonance?) Since the molecules in your hand are now moving faster, they have increased in temperature. Heat has been transferred! In fact, an incandescent light bulb gives off more energy in heat then it does in light. They are not very energy efficient.

Now, if it’s a hot sunny day outside, are you better off wearing a black or white shirt if you want to stay cool? This experiment will help you figure this out:

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You need:

• 2 ice cubes, about the same size.
• A white piece of paper
• A black piece of paper
• A sunny day

Download Student Worksheet & Exercises

1. Put the two pieces of paper on a sunny part of the sidewalk.

2. Put the ice cubes in the middle of the pieces of paper.

3. Wait.

What you should eventually see, is that the ice cube on the black sheet of paper melts faster then the ice cube on the white sheet. Dark colors absorb more infra-red radiation then light colors. Heat is transferred by radiation easier to something dark colored then it is to something light colored and so the black paper increased in temperature more then the white paper.

So, to answer the shirt question, a white shirt reflects more infra-red radiation so you’ll stay cooler. White walls, white cars, white seats, white shorts, white houses, etc. all act like mirrors for infra-red (IR) radiation. Which is why you can aim your TV remote at a white wall and still turn on the TV. Simply pretend the wall is a mirror (so you can get the angle right) and bounce the beam off the wall before it gets to your TV. It looks like magic!

Click over to this experiment to learn how to make Liquid Crystals.

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Click here to go to next lesson on Calorimeter.

You can’t get through a science or engineering degree without having performed a calorimetry lab. A calorimetry experiment is made of of inexpensive equipment (it only uses a coffee cup and a thermometer) and the calculations needed to do the experiment are pretty easy, so you can already tell that teachers are going to like them. They are useful in figuring out the specific heat capacity and the heat of fucion or dissolution of an unknown substance (usually a lump of metal). Here’s how to make a coffee cup calorimeter and do the calculations:

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Chemists use a bomb calorimeter to measure the heat flow for reactions that involve gases (since the gases would escape out of the coffee cup) and reactions at high temperatures (which would melt the cup). It works the same way as the coffee cup version, only the reaction is sealed and placed in water, which is then placed in an insulated container. It’s a more elaborate setup as well as analysis because now you take into account the heat flow into the parts of the calorimeter. Heat also does work as it transfers energy.

Click here to go to next lesson on Heat Engines.

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The Drinking Bird is a classic science toy that dips its head up and down into a glass of water. It’s filled with a liquid called methylene chloride, and the head is covered with red felt that gets wet when it drinks. But how does it work? Is it perpetual motion?

Let’s take a look at what’s going on with the bird, why it works, and how we’re going to modify it so it can run on its own without using any water at all!

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The bird needs a temperature difference between the head and tail. Since water needs heat in order to evaporate, the head cools as the water evaporates.  This temperature decrease lowers the pressure inside the head, pushing liquid up the inner tube. With more liquid (weight in the head), the bird tips over. The bird wets its own head to start this cycle again.

The trick to making this work is that when the bird is tipped over, the vapor from the bottom moves up the tube to equalize the pressure in both sides, or he’d stay put with his head in the cup.  Sadly, this isn’t perpetual motion because as soon as you take away the water, the cycle stops. It also stops if you enclose the bird in a jar so water can longer evaporate after awhile. Do you think this bird can work in a rainstorm? In Antarctica?

What’s so special about the liquid? Methylene chloride is made of carbon, hydrogen, and chlorine atoms. It’s barely liquid at room temperature, having a boiling point of 103.5° F, so it evaporates quite easily. It does have a high vapor pressure (6.7 psi), meaning that the molecules on the liquid surface leave (evaporate) and raise the pressure until the amount of molecules evaporating is equal to the amount being shoved back in the liquid (condensed) by its own pressure. (For comparison, water’s vapor pressure is only 0.4 psi).

Note that the vapor pressure will change with temperature changes. The vapor pressure goes up when the temperature goes up. Since the wet head is cooler than the tail, the vapor pressure at the top is less than at the bottom, which pushes the liquid up the tube.

It really does matter whether the bird is operating in Arizona or the Amazon.  The bird will dip more times per minute in a desert than a rain forest!

Let’s find out how to modify the bird so it’s entirely solar-powered… meaning that you don’t have to remember to keep the cup filled with water.  Here’s what you need:

• drinking bird
• silver or white spray paint
• black spray paint
• razor
• mug of hot water
• sunlight or incandescent light

Download Student Worksheet & Exercises

In this modification, you completely eliminated the water and converted the bird to solar, using the heat of the sun to power the bird. Now your bird bobs as long as you have sunlight!

How does that work? Since the bottom of the bird is now black, and black absorbs more energy and heats up the tail of the bird. Since the tail section is warmer, the pressure goes up and the liquid gets pushed up the tube. By covering the head with white (or silver) paint, you are reflecting most of the energy so it remains cool. Remember that white surfaces act like mirrors to IR light (which is what heat energy is).

Questions to Ask: Does it work better with hot or cold water? Does it work in an enclosed space, such as an inverted aquarium? On a rainy day or dry? In the fridge or heating pad?

Exercises Answer the questions below:

1. Where does most of the energy on earth come from?
   1. Underground
   2. The sun
   3. The oceans
2. What is one way that we use energy from the sun?
3. What is the process by which the liquid is being heated inside the bird?
   1. Precipitation
   2. Pressure
   3. Evaporation
   4. Transpiration

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Click here to go to next lesson on Hero Engine.

There are lots of different kids of heat engines, from stirling engines to big jet turbines to the engine in your car. They all use clever ways to convert a temperature difference into motion.

Remember that the molecules in steam move around a lot faster than in an ice cube. So when we stick hot steam in a container, we can blow off the lid (used with pistons in a steam engine). or we can put a fan blade in hot steam, and since the molecules move around a lot, they start bouncing off the blade and cause it to rotate (as in a turbine). Or we can seal up hot steam in a container and punch a tiny hole out one end (to get a rocket).

One of the first heat engines was dreamed up by Hero of Alexandria called the aeolipile. The steam is enclosed in a vessel and allowed to jet out two (or more) pipes. Although we’re not sure if his invention ever made it off the drawing board, we do know how to make one for pure educational (and entertainment) purposes.  Are you ready to have fun?

THIS EXPERIMENT USES FIRE AND STEAM…GET ADULT HELP BEFORE YOU OPERATE THE ENGINE.

Here’s what you do:

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Materials:

• soda can
• fishing line
• razor
• stand
• drill or large nail and hammer
• adult help
• candle

IMPORTANT NOTE: As the water boils, your can will spin. The hot steam shoots out the sides, so take care not to get burned. As the can spins, it may wobble and shake, especially if it’s off-center.  Be careful not to get shot with boiling water!!

What’s going on? When the water boils, the molecules inside are turning into hot steam and moving very quickly, bouncing off the can and out the pipes. Rockets and balloons use this same principle – the pressurized air shoots out the open end and the balloon (or rocket)  moves in the opposite direct.  Newton’s third law in motion! The two jets at an angle work together to spin the can.

1. Do you think the size of the hole matters?
2. Does it matter how many candles you use?
3. What if you used four holes instead of two? Six? Twenty?
4. Are beer cans better?

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Click here to go to next lesson on Stirling Engine

This project is for advanced students.This Stirling Engine project is a very advanced project that requires skill, patience, and troubleshooting persistence in order to work right.  Find yourself a seasoned Do-It-Yourself type of adult (someone who loves to fix things or tinker in the garage) before you start working on this project,  or you’ll go crazy with nit-picky things that will keep the engine from operating correctly.  This makes an excellent project for a weekend.

Developed in 1810s, this engine was widely used because it was quiet and could use almost anything as a heat source. This kind of heat engine squishes and expands air to do mechanical work. There’s a heat source (the candle) that adds energy to your system, and the result is your shaft spins (CD).

This engine converts the expansion and compression of gases into something that moves (the piston) and rotates (the crankshaft). Your car engine uses internal combustion to generate the expansion and compression cycles, whereas this heat engine has an external heat source.

This experiment is great for chemistry students learning about Charles’s Law, which is also known as the Law of Volumes, which describes how gases tend to expand when they are heated and can be mathematically written like this:

where V = volume, and T = temperature. So as temperature increases, volume also increases. In the experiment you’re about to do, you will see how heating the air causes the diaphragm to expand which turns the crank.

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Here’s what you need:

• three soda cans
• old inner tube from a bike wheel
• super glue and instrant dry
• electrical wire (3- conductor solid wire)
• 3 old CDs
• one balloon
• penny
• nylon bushing (from hardware store)
• alcohol burner (you can build one out of soda cans or Sterno canned heat)
• fishing line (15lb. test or similar)
• pack of steel wool
• drill with 1/16″ bit
• pliers
• scissors
• razor
• wire cutters
• electrical tape
• push pin
• permanent marker
• Swiss army knife (with can opener option)
• template

The Stirling heat engine is very different from the engine in your car.  When Robert Stirling invented the first Stirling engine in 1816, he thought it would be much more efficient than a gasoline or diesel engine. However, these heat engines are used only where quiet engines are required, such as in submarines or in generators for sailboats.

Download Student Worksheet & Exercises

Here’s how a Stirling engine is different from the internal-combustion engine inside your car. For example, the gases inside a Stirling engine never leave the engine because it’s an external combustion engine. This heat engine does not have exhaust valves as there are no explosions taking place, which is why Stirling engines are quieter. They use heat sources that are outside the engine, which opens up a wide range of possibilities from candles to solar energy to gasoline to the heat from your hand.

There are lots of different styles of Stirling engines. In this project, we’ll learn about the Stirling cycle and see how to build a simple heat engine out of soda cans.  The main idea behind the Stirling engine is that a certain volume of gas remains inside the engine and gets heated and cooled, causing the crankshaft to turn. The gases never leave the container (remember – no exhaust valves!), so the gas is constantly changing temperature and pressure to do useful work.  When the pressure increases, the temperature also increases. And when the temperature of the gases decreases, the pressure also goes down. (How pressure and temperature are linked together is called the “Ideal Gas Law”.)

Some Stirling engines have two pistons where one is heated by an external heat source like a candle and the other is cooled by external cooling like ice. Other displacer-type Stirling engines has one piston and a displacer. The displacer controls when the gas is heated and cooled.

In order to work, the heat engine needs a temperature difference between the top and bottom of the cylinder. Some Stirling engines are so sensitive that you can simply use the temperature difference between the air around you and the heat from your hand. Our Stirling engine uses temperature difference between the heat from a candle and ice water.

The balloon at the top of the soda can is actually the ‘power piston’ and is sealed to the can.  It bulges up as the gas expands. The displacer is the steel wool in the engine which controls the temperature of the air and allows air to move between the heated and cooled sections of the engine.

When the displacer is near the top of the cylinder, most of the gas inside the engine is heated by the heat source and gas expands (the pressure  builds inside the engine, forcing the balloon piston up). When the displacer is near the bottom of the cylinder, most of the gas inside the engine cools and contracts. (the pressure decreases and the balloon piston is allowed to contract).

Since the heat engine only makes power during the first part of the cycle, there’s only two ways to increase the power output: you can either increase the temperature of the gas (by using a hotter heat source), or by cooling the gases further by removing more heat (using something colder than ice).

Since the heat source is outside the cylinder, there’s a delay for the engine to respond to an increase or decrease in the heat or cooling source. If you use only water to cool your heat engine and suddenly pop an ice cube in the water, you’ll notice that it takes five to fifteen seconds to increase speed. The reason is because it takes time for the additional heat (or removal of heat by cooling) to make it through the cylinder walls and into the gas inside the engine. So Stirling engines can’t change the power output quickly. This would be a problem when getting on the freeway!

In recent years, scientists have looked to this engine again as a possibility, as gas and oil prices rise, and exhaust and pollutants are a concern for the environment. Since you can use nearly any heat source, it’s easy to pick one that has a low-fume output to power this engine. Scientists and engineers are working on a model that uses a Stirling engine in conjunction with an internal-combustion engine in a hybrid vehicle… maybe we’ll see these on the road someday!

Exercises

1. What is the primary input of energy for the Stirling engine?
2.  As Pressure increases in a gas, what happens to temperature?
   1. It increases
   2. Nothing
   3. It decreases
   4. It increases, then decreases
3. What is the primary output of the Stirling engine?

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Click here to go to next lesson on Ideal Gas Law.

The ideal gas law is important because you can predict how most gases with behave with a simple equation. Here’s how to do it:

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We’re nearly done! Take a peek at the list of concepts below and make sure you’ve got a good handle on them…

Scientific Concepts:

• The terms hot, cold, warm etc. describe what physicists call thermal energy.
• Thermal energy is how much the molecules are moving inside an object.
• The faster molecules move, the more thermal energy that object has.
• There are different scales for measuring temperature: Fahrenheit, Celsius, Rankine and Kelvin.
• Temperature is basically a speedometer for molecules. The faster they are wiggling and jiggling, the higher the temperature and the higher the thermal energy that object has.
• Solids have strong, stiff bonds between molecules that hold the molecules in place. Liquids have loose, stringy bonds between molecules that hold molecules together but allow them some flexibility. Gasses have no bonds between the molecules. Plasma is similar to gas but the molecules are very highly energized. Materials change from one state to another depending on the temperature and these bonds.
• Changing from a solid to a liquid is called melting. Changing from a liquid to a gas is called boiling, evaporating, or vaporizing. Changing from a gas to a liquid is called condensation. Changing from a liquid to a solid is called freezing.
• All materials have given points at which they change from state to state.
• Melting point is the temperature at which a material changes from solid to liquid. Boiling point is the temperature at which a material changes from liquid to gas. Condensation point is the temperature at which a material changes from gas to liquid. Freezing point is the temperature at which a material changes from liquid to gas.
• Heat is the movement of thermal energy from one object to another. Heat can only flow from an object of a higher temperature to an object of a lower temperature.
• Heat can be transferred from one object to another through conduction, convection and radiation.
• Conduction is the wiggle and bump method of heat transfer. Faster moving molecules bump into slower moving molecules speeding them up. Those molecules then bump into other molecules speeding them up and so on increasing the temperature of the object.
• Convection is heat being transferred by currents of moving gas or liquid caused by hot air/liquid rising and cold air/liquid falling.
• Radiation is the transfer of heat by electromagnetic radiation, specifically infra-red radiation.
• When an object absorbs heat it does not necessarily change temperature. As objects change state they do not change temperature. The heat that goes into something as it’s changing phases is used to change the “bonds” between molecules. Freezing points, melting points, boiling points and condensation points are the “speed limits” of the phases. Once the molecules reach that speed they must change state.
• Objects release heat as they freeze and condense. Objects absorb heat as they evaporate and melt.
• Heat capacity is how much heat an object can absorb before its temperature increases.
• Specific heat is how much heat energy a mass of a material must absorb before it increases 1°C.
• Each material has its own specific heat. The higher a material’s specific heat is, the more heat it must absorb before its temperature increases. Water has a very high heat capacity.

Yay! You’ve completed the lessons in Thermodynamics! Now it’s time to try your own problem set.

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