Topics in Thermodynamics

Lessons in Thermodynamics of Solutions and Liquid Mixtures

Review by David Bradley



Chemists at Leicester University, England, have built an educational website covering all aspects of thermodynamics in 300 topics. If I remember rightly from my University days, thermodynamics was one of the tougher areas of chemistry to master, but once you had it  covered many other aspects of the subject fell into place. To quote from the introductory section to this new site: "Thermodynamics offers an elegant summary of the experience gained by chemists in chemical laboratories and an indication of how experimental data can be analysed to gain an understanding of chemical reactions. For the most part chemists are concerned with the properties of solutions in the context of (i) chemical equilibriums, and (ii) chemical reactions between solute molecules, thereby synthesising new chemical substances. Underlying these important phenomena, chemical equilibriums and spontaneous chemical reactions, are quantitative statements based on chemical thermodynamics". If you've been struggling with your enthalpies and entropies, then this is the place to go to help you grasp those concepts.

http://www.le.ac.uk/chemistry/thermodynamics/

If you reached this page looking for information on our cool coffee experiment, then you need to check out this page.

 

For an alternative spin on the coffee experiment what about adding cream first or after the coffee to the cup, does that affect final temperature? Find out here.

One physical chemist also asked the question whether or not black coffee at the same temperature as a cup of coffee with powdered creamer would cool down more quickly because of the higher rate of radiation from the surface of the liquid. It should be relatively easy to devise and experiment to see whether that is the case or not, but I suspect that a difference of tenths of a degree would be seen and might be beyond the error limits of a simple experiments.


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