Wed. Week 1, Feb. 26: Thermal expansion, latent heat and pressure relationships

Today, the class continued coverage on thermodynamics by performing specific experiments on thermal expansion, latent heat of a phase change and pressure relationships.

Thermal expansion was the first attempted lab. An aluminum tube pushed on a pulley as it expanded with added heat from steam traveling through the tube.

 The degrees that the pullley was turned in degrees was measured and graphs were generated for both angle and temperature

The next experiment was the latent heat, and was accomplished by simply using a Styrofoam cup as a thermal insulator, an immersion heater and a temperature probe attached to logger pro.

 
In this experiment, we started off by predicting the shape of the  temperature vs. time graph of ice water slowly being heated to its boiling point.

Afterward, the experiment was performed for the class, which showed that there was no flat region where the water still contained significant amounts of ice as was expected. This leads to the conclusion that the immersion heater was adding heat to the water faster than the ice could absorb it.

 After that, the class collected their own data on an experiment for the latent heat of vaporization. All the values were collected to get a value for our measurement's uncertainty, which was then used to see if our measured values fell within range of the true value.

For the last part of lab, the class attempted to predict the relationship between pressure and several other values.

The relationship between pressure and volume proved to be curved instead of linear as expected, which may be due to the dynamics of the gas molecules at high pressure.