Heat Flow and Specific Heat

     The very first day of class involved learning about heat but the focus was more on the heat flow and specific heat in different scenarios. The class began by finding the relationship between each of the temperature scales which included Fahrenheit, Celsius and Kelvin. Professor Mason gave the class different facts regarding the boiling points to the freezing points of water so that connections could be drawn and make a graph. Afterwards, the slope of the graph was found which gave the equation that tied the different temperature scales together.

     A couple of experiments were done afterwards to further understand heat flow and heat capacity.

The picture above shows how we as a group came to find what we thought was the room temperature of the classroom. We though it was 74 degrees F and the we converted that into Celsius and then into Kelvin. Then we took all of the class's information and found the uncertainty as well as the mean temperature.

We then tried a heat flow experiment by mixing a cup of hot water with a cup of ice water and predicting what the final temperature will be. 

We did the exact prediction of heat flow for this experiment but we had to consider that there was a new material involved which in this case was an aluminum can. Since a new material is involved we had to take it into consideration. We were solving for the heat capacity of the aluminum can.

We then moved on to heat conduction and Professor Mason asked us to see what variables would be present in such a circumstance. The variables we chose are seen in the picture above.

Above is a problem illustrating heat conduction between a bar that is made up of copper and aluminum.We where supposed to find the temperature in the middle of the bar.

We then finished the lecture by doing another experiment which in this case involved a heat flow concept but we used it in order to find a different way of interpreting the heat flow function. We only used the data in the middle because the ends did not make much sense.

     The overall day could be summed up into one word, Heat. We had not only learned the concept but we embraced it by performing different types of experiments that helped us further understand heat flow and capacity as well as thermal conductivity.