Preliminary investigation
Plan
- Collect 4 different sized beakers
- Boil some water in the kettle
- Pour 50ml into each beaker
- After 1 minute check temperature
- Repeat step 4 after another minute continue this for 5 minutes
Main Investigation
Aim
To find out weather a beaker with a larger surface area cools quicker than one with a smaller surface area.
Fair test
To make it a fair test we will keep the following the same:
Colour of tin – we will use clear beakers
Amount of water – we will use 100ml boiling water in each beaker
Insulation – we will make sure the beakers are all the same thickness
Room temperature – we will do all the experiments at the same time in the same room
Lid – we will not use lids on any of our beakers
Variables
We will measure 100ml boiling water into each beaker. The variable we will change is the surface area.
Findings of preliminary work
In our main experiment we will make sure we label each beaker and measure the surface area of each beaker
Prediction
I think the beaker with the largest surface are will cool quicker because there is more surface exposed to the air which will make it cool faster. The beaker with the smallest surface area will cool the slowest because there is less of the surface exposed to the air which would cool it faster.
Apparatus
3 beakers
Thermometer
Stopwatch
Kettle
Water
Method
- Collect apparatus
- Boil water in kettle
- Pour 100ml boiling water into 1 of the beakers
- Measure the start temperature
- Measure again after:
1 minute
2 minutes
3minutes
4 minutes
5 minutes
- we repeated this with two other beakers of water
- we calculated the temperature change for each beaker
- we will use the results to calculate which beaker cools the fastest
Results
Surface Areas
Beaker 1 - 16cm3
Beaker 2 - 22cm3
Beaker 3 - 36cm3
Conclusion
We found out that a larger surface area looses heat the fastest. The bigger the surface area the bigger the drop in temperature. This proves our prediction was correct.
There is a clear pattern in our results as the temperature decrease is steady and there are no inaccurate results.
Evaluation
The method we used was good as it was simple and we did not get any of the beakers mixed up.
If we had planned the experiment better we would have measured the temperature every 2 minutes for 10 minutes rather than every minute for only 5 minutes this would have hopefully given more accurate results. Another way we could have got more accurate results is to do the experiment again to compare the results.