Calorimetry Experiments in University Courses

Abstract In this work we investigated in detail a calorimetry experiment often executed in university courses. The motivation was the consistent occurrence of issues regarding the determination of the specific heat of a test part by the students, which often obtained negative values. We explored many variations of the “standard” method, as we called it, which consisted of measuring the specific heat of a metal part by having it reach the thermal equilibrium with a water sample within a simple calorimeter. Besides this method, we also explored an alternative one based on the Joule effect. The results show that one of the variations of the standard method to be the one that yields the best results. However, the alternative method obtained better results than some of the variations of the standard method and is also richer in the exploration of physical concepts and data analysis.