Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

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.

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.