This interactive simulation is designed to help students visualize heat transfer and build a foundation to understand specific heat and thermal properties of matter. As an object of uniform temperature is heated by a flame and cooled by the surrounding medium, the model computes the temperature as a function of time. Students can choose from three materials: copper, aluminum, or iron. They can also select values for mass and volume of the object. This lumped system approximation is valid if the rate of thermal energy transfer within the object is faster than the rate of thermal energy transfer at the surface.

Editor's Note: See Annotations for content support on the topics of heat, temperature, and specific heat capacity.

This simulation was developed to supplement an article by William Dittrich, "Measuring the specific heat of metals by cooling", which has been accepted for publication in The Physics Teacher (TPT).  

This item was created with Easy Java Simulations (EJS), a modeling tool that allows users without formal programming experience to generate computer models and simulations. To run the simulation, simply click the Java Archive file below. To modify or customize the model, See Related Materials for detailed instructions on installing and running the EJS Modeling and Authoring Tool.

Please note that this resource requires at least version 1.5 of Java.