Can the heat capacity of a substance change?

While the substance is undergoing a phase transition, such as melting or boiling, its specific heat capacity is technically infinite, because the heat goes into changing its state rather than raising its temperature.

What factors affect heat capacity?

This quantity is known as the specific heat capacity (or simply, the specific heat), which is the heat capacity per unit mass of a material. Experiments show that the transferred heat depends on three factors: (1) The change in temperature, (2) the mass of the system, and (3) the substance and phase of the substance.

What does an object’s heat capacity depend on?

The heat capacity of an object depends both on its mass and its chemical composition.

What causes change in specific heat?

When materials are heated, the molecules gain kinetic energy and start moving faster. The result is that the material gets hotter. Different materials require different amounts of energy to change temperature.

Why is heat capacity different for different materials?

The specific heat capacity of different substances vary for the same reason that different substances have different melting and boiling points to one another. If the bonds between atoms are stronger, it will require more energy to heat up the substance.

How does mass affect heat capacity?

If the material of an object is made of uniform in composition you can use the specific heat capacity for that material to calculate the heat capacitance of the object. So doubling the mass of an object doubles its heat capacity, but does not change its specific heat capacitance.

What is heat capacity of a substance?

Heat capacity is the ratio of the amount of heat energy transferred to an object to the resulting increase in its temperature. Specific heat capacity is a measure of the amount of heat necessary to raise the temperature of one gram of a pure substance by one degree K.

How does concentration affect heat capacity?

Also, the higher the concentration the lower the specific heat capacity. A lower specific heat capacity means it taks less energy to heat the water up by 1°C so the time taken to heat it up will be less, given the same amount of energy supplied .