Chem Blog Week 13

This week, I learned about energy transfer through the three states of matter, and I learned about ETh and EPh.

 Eph is the energy transferred when a state of matter is changed. When a substance changes state from liquid to gas, the particles of gas are arranged even more freely and are spread out the most. So, if a solid changed to a liquid, there would be more phase energy because the arrangement of the particles is farther apart than that of a solid. So when you think about state changes think about phase energy.Eth is associated with temperature changes and the movement of particles. The increase of Eth means that the speed of the particles is more fluid and that the temperature is higher . To change the motion and speed of the particles, the amount of energy changes the attraction between the particles. If the particles have a weak attraction, then the particles will move faster, and if they have a strong attraction, then they will move slower. Thus, in a liquid, the particles of a liquid have a weak attraction since they are not closely together. In contrast, a solid has the strongest attraction between the particles since they are the closest together. A gas has the weakest attraction because the particles are the farthest together.

We also did an experiment to find the specific heat of copper. This week, my group and I had to come up with a procedure before we started. First, we had to measure the mass of the copper, then the water's mass, then, the temperature change of copper after putting it in water and the temperature change of water . This also included us to find the original temperature by looking at a graph of different metal colors depending on their temperature.  Then, I set the specific heat formula of water to the specific heat formula of copper equal to each other to figure out the specific heat (c) with E=mcΔT formula for both. Since the volume of water was 150 ml, and the density of water is 1g/ml, its mass was 150 g, the temperature change was 12.5ºC, and the specific heat is 4.18J/gºC. With the copper, the mass was 39.5 g, and its temperature change was around 480ºC. When we found our specific heat , all the other groups  compared and averaged them all out. However we found the actual measurement of specific heat wasn’t really close to our results!

This week was pretty easy. I understood all of the concepts and I really enjoyed doing the experiment with the copper. I learned that when doing an experiment like this one it is essential to pay attention to the directions and not to rush, if not it could skew the results and someone could be injured due to carelessness. While I still don’t have a computer these weekly blogs still help me remember the things I learned. Hopefully I will have it back soon, but writing them down still does the job!