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A low-cost method for measuring the specic heat of aluminium

Wilton Pereira da Silva1 , Jrgen W Precker1 , Diogo D P S e Silva1 and Cleiton D P S e Silva2
Departamento de Fsica, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, 58109-970 Campina Grande-PB, Brazil 2 Instituto Tecnolgico de Aeronutica, S J Campos, SP, Brazil E-mail: wiltonps@uol.com.br
1

Abstract One of the standard experiments in basic thermodynamics is the determination of the specic heat of solids and liquids using a water calorimeter. Recently, the measurement of the specic heat of aluminium without the use of a calorimeter has been proposed, where the cooling curves of the systems container/water and container/water/sample are analysed. Here we discuss an application of this method that simplies Newtons law of cooling. In spite of the use of only low-cost instruments, this application yields consistent results in determining the specic heat of aluminium.

Introduction
The specic heat of a substance can be measured by using a container lled with water (the system) and submerging a sample of the substance to be investigated. If the walls of the container are not adiabatic one needs to know how the system loses heat to the environment before and after the immersion of the sample. This is possible by the application of Newtons law of cooling. Its application consists in measuring the temperature T of the system at regular intervals of time t and tracing the curve of T versus t before and after the immersion. Then, one needs to determine the temperature of the system immediately before the immersion of the sample, and also soon after the internal heat transfer due to the immersion. Therefore, it must be supposed that the experimental set-up is such that the internal heat transfers can be considered sufciently rapid that a nal equilibrium temperature can be identied. Once this temperature is identied, the equation of heat balance can be used to determine the specic heat.
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This reasoning was used without strong mathematical rigour in [1], where the temperatures of the system before and after immersion were estimated from a graph. In that experiment, a small mass of aluminium was used, and consequently the sample had a small heat capacity in comparison to the heat capacity of the system. The immersion of the aluminium thus caused a small variation of temperature. The advantage of this procedure is that one has two decay curves with similar slopes, which facilitates the estimation of the temperature difference before and after immersion. But if this temperature difference is very small the nal result may not be very good. A similar experiment was proposed in [2], where the analysis of the experimental data was carried out with strong mathematical rigour. But this procedure may not be suitable for high school level, because it involves the nonlinear regression of a function to the experimental data, and the matrix of covariances for the calculation of error propagation. The object of this article is to determine the
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A low-cost method for measuring the specic heat of aluminium

specic heat of aluminium, as described by [1], but to propose a renement of the analysis of the data that uses a linear approximation of Newtons law of cooling for small time intervals.

Table 1. Decay of the temperature T versus time t before the immersion of the aluminium (region I). t (min) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 0.0 1.5 3.0 4.5 6.0 7.5 9.0 T ( C) 82.0 79.5 77.0 74.5 72.0 70.0 68.0

Experimental procedure and measurements

A can of soft drink was chosen as a container for the water because it consists of the same material as the sample, namely aluminium. Since the proposed experiment requires that the internal heat transfer after the immersion of the aluminium is rapid, a large number of small aluminium pieces should be used in order to increase the contact area water/aluminium. Here, 30 bars of cross section 7 7 mm2 and approximately 90 mm length were used. These dimensions of the aluminium were chosen because they were easily available. But there is no particular reason for this choice, and any other convenient dimensions may be used, for example pellets, so long as the surface of the aluminium is large. A sketch of the experiment is shown in gure 1. The system container/water was heated and placed upon a bench. Then, starting at t0 = 0, its temperature was measured every 1.5 min (see table 1), starting with an initial value T0 . At t = 9 min and 20 s, i.e. t = 9.33 min, the aluminium bars, which were initially at room temperature, were introduced, rapidly and all together, into the system. This time was chosen because 20 s after

Table 2. Decay of the temperature T versus time t after the immersion of the aluminium (region II). t (min) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 12.0 15.0 18.0 21.0 24.0 27.0 30.0 33.0 36.0 39.0 42.0 45.0 48.0 51.0 54.0 57.0 60.0 T ( C) 59.0 57.5 56.5 55.5 54.5 53.0 52.0 51.0 50.2 49.5 48.5 47.5 46.8 46.0 45.2 44.5 43.6

thermometer

the last temperature reading was enough time to prepare the immersion of the aluminium. But t = 9 min and 30 s, for example, would also work if the experimenter nds it more convenient. The process of immersion took about one second. From 12 min onward, the temperature of the new system was measured every 3 min (see table 2). The characteristic data of the experimental set-up are: Mass of water Mass of the container Mass of aluminium Room temperature MW = 266.0 g MCon = 11.6 g MAl = 277.7 g TRT = 25.0 C.

aluminium bars

Theoretical aspects
soft drink can

Figure 1. Sketch of the experimental set-up.

At the moment of the insertion, both the container (mass MCon ) and the water (mass MW ) are at the same temperature TH . At the instant t = 9.33 min, the aluminium sample (mass MAl ) at temperature TRT is introduced into the system.
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75 temperature (C) 70 region I 65 60 t = 9.33 min 55 0 5 10 15 time (min) 20 25 region II

Figure 2. Cooling of the system before (region I) and after (region II) the insertion of the aluminium. The aluminium bars are introduced at t = 9.33 min, and almost instantaneous thermal equilibrium is supposed. The full curves are the straight lines fitted to the data points.

Since the internal heat transfers are supposed to be immediate, the temperature of the new system reaches TL almost instantaneously. The heat released by the system equals the heat received by the immersed aluminium, and heat balance leads to cAl = MW (TH TL ) cW (1) MAl (TL TRT ) MCon (TH TL )

where cAl and cW are the specic heats of aluminium and water, respectively. Figure 2 shows the last four experimental points of table 1 and the rst four experimental points of table 2 on a single graph. Thus, two cooling curves (before and after the immersion of the sample) appear. This procedure, i.e. to include only a few points in the neighbourhood of the instant t = 9.33 min, allows signicant simplications of the analysis of the obtained cooling curves.

regions I and II are represented by exponential curves that cannot be approximated by straight lines. An example for a didactic exploration of Newtons law of cooling can be found in [3]. It should be noted that the differences in temperature between the system and the environment are relatively high in region I. Since Newtons law of cooling applies only for temperature differences that are not too high, we tested it by a least-squares t of the experimental data to the exponential function describing newtonian cooling. This t conrms that the cooling curve of region I (see table 1) obeys Newtons law of cooling rather well. Newtons law of cooling also explains why a given mass of a substance cut into pieces cools down quicker than the mass as a whole. According to Newton, the rate of heat loss dq/dt is proportional to the area A of heat exchange. A given mass of aluminium at given initial conditions contains a xed amount of internal energy, fragmented or not. Thus, the larger rate of heat loss due to the larger area of the fragmented mass causes it to cool more quickly. The simplication proposed in this article consists in considering just a few points in the neighbourhood of the time t at which the aluminium is inserted into the water. Inspection of gure 2 shows that for this case, at least to a rst approximation, the two regions can be approximated by straight lines of the form T = a + bt, where T is the temperature of the water in the can in C and t the time in min. Hence, the parameters a and b can be determined for each of the two straight lines, either by graphical methods using graph paper or by software that ts a straight line to the experimental points. One such piece of software is LABFit [4], the application of which yields Region I: T = 80.80 1.433t TH (9.33) = 67.43 C Region II: T = 63.45 0.3833t TL (9.33) = 59.87 C (2)

Data analysis and determination of the specic heat of aluminium

Newtons law of cooling says that the rate at which heat is lost by an object is proportional to the difference between its temperature T and that of its surroundings TRT : dq/dt = kA(T TRT ), where k is a constant and A the area where heat exchange takes place. This law implies an exponential decrease of temperature with time. Thus, if all measured temperatures T of tables 1 and 2 are plotted against time t, as done in [2], the two
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(3)

(where the last digit in these expressions is written for numerical reasons, but has no physical signicance). By inserting these temperatures and the characteristic data of the experiment into equation (1), one obtains for the experimental value of the specic heat of aluminium cexp = 877 J kg1 K 1 . (4)
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A low-cost method for measuring the specic heat of aluminium

Here we used cW = 4186 J kg1 K 1 (= 1 kcal kg1 C1 by denition) for the specic heat of water. For comparison, the value of the specic heat at room temperature quoted in the literature is [5] c = 910 J kg1 K 1 . (5) If all the experimental data of tables 1 and 2 are used for a nonlinear regression of the exponential function that describes Newtons law of cooling, one obtains for the specic heat of aluminium c = 858 J kg1 K 1 . (6)

Discussion and conclusions

The result (4) obtained by the simplied procedure proposed here is closer to that quoted in the literature (5) than the result obtained in [2] where Newtons law of cooling was explored. This, of course, does not mean that the simplied method is better than the more rigorous one based on the exponential form of Newtons law of cooling. Probably, some systematic errors have favoured the simplied procedure of data analysis. Among the systematic errors that were not taken into account are the evaporation of water during the cooling process, the thermal response time of the mercury thermometer, the temperature dependence of the specic heats, and impurities in the aluminium sample. The crucial point of the experiment is that thermal equilibrium must be almost instantaneous, which restricts this method to materials with high thermal conductivity, and careful timing and some experimental skill are required for the insertion of the aluminium sample into the water. The time of the insertion of the sample must coincide with the time at which TH and TL are calculated. An error of a few seconds in the experimenters determination of the time at which the sample is inserted may change the result signicantly. Furthermore, the sample should be fragmented in such a way that a sufciently large contact area with water is available for heat transfer. One may wonder why we selected four experimental points, and not three or ve, for the linear regression. At the lower extreme, two points determine a straight line completely

with no degree of freedom left for the tting procedure; thus, at least three points should be used. On the other hand, the exponential form of the curve becomes evident for more than ve points, and linear regression will be very crude. So, four points seem to be a reasonable compromise. Incidentally, the determination of the specic heat for three and ve experimental data points yields c = 876.5 J kg1 K 1 and 875.7 J kg1 K 1 , respectivelya surprisingly coherent result (the last digit of these values is, of course, physically insignicant, and shown only for numerical reasons). Thus, we conclude that this experiment gives good results even though the approach is a simplication of a more thorough one. One nal point deserves consideration: the two curves have signicantly different slopes, which may provoke signicant errors if the experimenter does not have full control in performing the experiment. It may be interesting to repeat the same experiment with an analogous data analysis using a soft drink can placed inside thermal insulation. Then, the two straight lines should have almost the same slope, and even students with little experience in quantitative experiments should obtain consistent results.
Received 12 March 2004, in nal form 26 April 2004 PII: S0031-9120(04)77506-1 doi:10.1088/0031-9120/39/6/008

References
[1] Mattos C R and Gaspar A 2002 Introducing specic heat through cooling curves Phys. Teach. 40 415 [2] Silva W P, Precker J W, Silva C M D P S e, Silva D D P S e and Silva C D P S e 2003 Medida de calor especco e a lei de resfriamento de Newton; um renamento na anlise dos dados experimentais Rev. Bras. Ens. Fs. 25 (4) 392 [3] OConnell J 1999 Heating water: rate correction due to newtonian cooling Phys. Teach. 37 551 [4] Silva W P and Silva C M D P S 2004 LAB Fit curve tting software, available online at www.angelre.com/rnb/labt date of access: 02/03/2004 [5] Halliday D, Resnick R and Walker J 1997 Fundamentals of Physics Extended 5th edn (New York: John Wiley) p 462

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