Calorimeter Lab Report

The purpose of this experiment is to find what design of calorimeter captured the most energy from a combusted chip. To find this, we tested each design, and calculated the amount of energy it captured from a baked potato chip.

The two basic forms of energy are kinetic energy and potential energy. Kinetic energy is the energy of motion. A ball has kinetic energy when it flies through the air. The ball has the ability to do work in that it can act upon other objects with when it collides. Potential energy is stored energy that objects have because of their position. A cup on a table has potential energy: If you knock the cup off the table, gravity will accelerate the cup, and its potential energy will convert to kinetic energy. Kinetic energy is the energy of mass in motion. The kinetic energy of an object is the energy it has because of its motion. Conservation of
The specific heat of an object depends what phase it is in. The more mass an object has, the more heat you will have to add for the temperature to change. The change in temperature also depends on how much you want the temperature to change by. Heat, which is represented as q, equals mass, which is represented as M times specific heat capacity, which is represented as C times delta T. The type of calorimeter that most people use is as simple as a Styrofoam cup filled with water with a thermometer and sometimes a stirrer. There is also the more advanced bomb calorimeter which is the more advanced simple calorimeter designed to withstand a lot of pressure.

During the testing of each differently designed calorimeter there was one group that definitely had the best design. Group three seemed to stand out by having the highest energy captured in their calorimeter while combusting the chip. This well designed calorimeter captured a total of 21% energy blowing away the other calorimeter