specific heats and such

[Notasciencewhiz]

Hello. My science fair project is going to be on the specific heats of certain household items like fabrics, paper, peanuts, or bread. I was plannng to build a bomb calorimeter, but I was unable to find a site with direcions. I looked at the entry entitled Calorimeter, which was of some help, but do you know of any websites that have a diagram or something? Also any other resources having anything to do with my project that you can think of would be very helpful. Thank you.

[paulsdecarli]

Some of the things you mentioned (paper, cloth, bread) would be really hard to measure because they have such low specific heats and because methods that involve immersion in liquid ( such as water) would be hard to use because of problems (like air bubbles) related to material porosity.

It might be easier to stick with metals (aluminum or stainless steel ) , non-porous ceramics (coffee cups, corning ware), glass, and plastics..

There are some simple experiments that can be made without an elaborate calorimeter. For example if one wraps a coffee cup with foam insulation. the rate at which the temperature of hot water poured into a cold cup changes will give a measure of the specific heat of the cup material.

Hint at practicality: My wife can drink very hot coffee, so she always preheats her coffee cup. I like my coffee less hot, so I always pour my coffee into a cold and massive ceramic coffee cup.