Specific Heat Capacity

• Specific Heat Capacity


  A sciencey way of saying how hard it is to heat something up
• Different Materials


  • Have different specific heat capacities
• Heating materials


  1. More energy needs to be transferred to the thermal energy store of some materials to increase their temperature than others

  2. For example, you need 4200 J to warm 1 kg of water by 1 °C, but only 139J to warm 1 kg of mercury by 1 °C

  3. Materials that need to gain lots of energy in their thermal energy stores to warm up also transfer loads of energy when they cool down again. They can 'store' a lot of energy
• Specific heat capacity


  The amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 kg of a substance by 1°C
• Investigating specific heat capacity

  1. Measure the mass of the block

  2. Wrap the block in insulation

  3. Measure the initial temperature of the block

  4. Set the potential difference of the power supply to 10 V and turn it on

  5. Measure the block's temperature increase over time

  6. Calculate the energy transferred to the block using P=VI and the time

  7. Plot a graph of energy transferred vs temperature increase

  8. Find the gradient of the straight part of the graph, which is ΔE/Δθ. The specific heat capacity is then (gradient x mass of block)
• You can also investigate the specific heat capacity of liquids by placing the heater and thermometer in an insulated beaker filled with a known mass of the liquid
• The equation for Specific Heat Capacity

  E = m × c × θ