Monday, January 23, 2012

On the Freezing and Melting Point of Water

After a long hiatus, our Physics 103.1 lab resumed last Monday. What greeted us back was a relatively easy and quite fun experiment that dealt with the phase changes of water: freezing and melting. This entailed that we would be dealing with ice (which was fun to munch on) since we had to freeze tap water and monitor the temperature changes accompanying it. After creating ice, we boiled a cup of water and placed our newly frozen ice near the warm water. Similar to the first part, we measured the temperature along the way until the ice melted. 

Our results showed that the freezing and melting points were one and the same- that is, 0 deg celsius. Also, the plot of temperature vs time for the freezing part fitted an exponential graph with negative argument while that of the melting part had a constant part and an exponential part. We encountered a bit of a problem with freezing the ice because we forgot to put salt (which causes freezing point depression on the surrounding water used to freeze the ice). But otherwise, it was smooth sailing.