Monday, March 26, 2007

Great Bolts of Fire

The experiment that I did entitled "Understanding The Difference Between Temperature and Heat" had a few flaws in it. I made a few adjustments and the results were a bit better. I used bolts that were extremely different sizes. I used test tubes and a smaller amount of water instead of having a larger volume of water like there was in the styrofoam cups. The experiment results are as follows; first for your experiment and then my adjusted experiment.


Your Experiment

Original Water Temperature - 22 °C

Tube 1 (large bolt) temperature - 24C (temp. measured every min. for 4 mins. - no change)
Tube 2 (small bolt) temperature - 23C (temp. measured every min. for 4 mins - no change)

My Adjusted Experiment

Original Water Temperature – 21 °C
Minute
Tube 1 (large bolt) temperature - 29C (temp. measured every min. for 4 mins. - no change)
Tube 2 (small bolt) temperature - 23C (temp. measured every min. for 4 mins - no change)

original experiment by Dr. Patrick Boyle
adjusted experiment by Dr Luna Spacey of Heat Team C

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Dr Spacey,
I wonder could you relate the results of your experiment to our project to Design Housing for Sustainable Living? How do you see this relationship? I am interested in designing a truly energy efficient house and I think this can help me.

Anonymous said...

Dear Dr. Spacey,
I am a student of Dr. Boyle's and I have been attempting to repeat your experiment since you achieved good results with your modifications to Dr. Boyle's procedure. I have not reproduced your results and I think it is because there are a couple of items that are not clear in your procedure. First what volume of water did you use in your test tubes? What was the mass of the bolts you used? Could you please e-mail this info. so that it can be posted on the BLOG. so that I can repeat your experiment and get equally impressive results?
Thank-you from a student

Unknown said...

This experiment is telling us that we want to build a smaller house for sustainable living. My reasoning for this is that with a smaller house you have a smaller amount of space that needs heating during the year. Which means that it won't cost as much to heat a smaller house. With this information you could theoretically build the perfect house for the Johnson Family. They want a low cost for energy bills in their house. Heating takes up energy. With a smaller house you need less heat which means you need to use less energy.

Anonymous said...

I guess the way I look at it is the amount of Heat depends not only on the temperature but also on the mass of matter that is at a particular temperature. The large bolt and the small the bolt were at the same temperature when you put them in the test tube but the large bolt had more heat energy because it had a larger mass. I guess that's why it heated the water to 29C insteas of 23C.
A very nice demonstration Dr. Spacey. Thank you again
Dr B.