This is a picture of the very first activity we engaged in on our first day of class. It is simply a graph that shows the relationship between temperature in degrees Celsius and Farrenheight. There really isn't much more to it than that.
This a rough picture of the setup for the first experiment we conducted today. The actual experiment used two thermistor probes, with one touching the outside of the can which was surrounded by hot water and the other probe touching the inside of the can which contained cold water. The purpose of this experiment was to determine the thermal conductivity of aluminum.
This is of course a graph of what the two thermistor probes read during the heat transfer process. Looking at the bottom portion of the graph, I believe that whoever was holding it did not hold it to the actual inside of the can the entire time. Anyway, we were supposed to use the slope of one of the functions as a "Q" value which we would use to solve for the thermal conductivity of aluminum.
Somewhere in this awful photograph is the equation we would use to solve for the thermal conductivity of aluminum. As mentioned previously, "Q" was supposed to be found using the previously described graph, but the units do not work out. The slope of the line in the previous graph is measured in degrees C/ seconds, and this does not help me very much.The units I need are Jewels/ seconds. I will discuss this with my colleagues, and post the answer along with its uncertainty in a post later this week!
This is the second experiment we conducted today which involves some water, a thermistor probe, and an immersion heater. We weren't initially aware of exactly what the point of the experiment was, but it seemed that we were to determine what the slope of the line of the graph of heat vs. temperature meant physically. After the energy was transferred into the 200 mL of water by the heater while the probe was stirred, a graph was made using LoggerPro. It was my partner Andrew that came up with the idea that the slope was indeed the value of liquid water's heat capacity. Of course, our value of .9632 J/ degrees Celsius is not the same as the 4.186 J/ degrees Celsius, but this is because we used roughly 200 grams of water as opposed to 1 gram. Considering the entire class got similar results, I believe that these results should be considered rather reliable.
