Water’s temperature is hard to change because of its high specfic heat, which determines why how much energy is required to change something one degree celsius. Water has a high specific heat because of its hydrogen bonds.
Author: Kevin Park
Editor: Nayoung Kim
Have you ever wondered why when making a cup of ramen it takes a long time for it to boil? That's because of water’s high specific heat. According to USGS, high specific heat is “defined by the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of a substance 1 degree Celsius (°C).” That is why water takes a long time to boil, it needs a lot of heat before it reaches the 100 degrees mark before it boils. How high is water’s specific heat? It's 4.18 J/mol g. For comparison, lead only has a specific heat of 0.128 J/mol g, over 32 times less than water. However, this specific heat varies on the substance’s state of matter. When water is solid, its specific heat capacity changes to only 2093 J/mol g. Normally, gases have the most enormous specific heat, however, in water, it is only 1.996 J/mol g. Why is this the case?
So why does water have a weirdly high specific heat? The main thing that contributes to high specific heat is bond strengths between atoms. There are two kinds, intermolecular and intramolecular. For this, we only need to focus on intermolecular bonding, specifically, hydrogen bonding. A hydrogen bond is “an intermolecular force (IMF) that forms a special type of dipole-dipole attraction when a hydrogen atom bonded to a strongly electronegative atom exists in the vicinity of another electronegative atom with a lone pair of electrons.” This only forms in the presence of hydrogen and either fluorine, oxygen, or nitrogen. Hydrogen bonds are the strongest type of intermolecular bonding, and because its the strongest, it needs more energy for the bond to break. This is why water has a high specific heat, due to the heat, or energy required to break the two hydrogen bonds to turn the water molecule from a liquid to a gas. This is also the reason why water’s gaseous form has a lower specific heat than its liquid form because the main thing contributing to its specific heat is its hydrogen bonds, but in its gaseous form, it breaks those bonds to be free and gasous
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Reference:
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Libretexts. (2020, August 21). Hydrogen bonding. Chemistry LibreTexts. Retrieved July 6, 2022, fromhttps://chem.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry_Textbook_Maps/Supplemental_Modules_(Physical_and_Theoretical_Chemistry)/Physical_Properties_of_Matter/Atomic_and_Molecular_Properties/Intermolecular_Forces/Specific_Interactions/Hydrogen_Bonding#:~:text=A%20hydrogen%20bond%20is%20an,(IMFs)%20occur%20between%20molecules.
United States Geological Survey. (2018, June 6). Specific heat capacity and water completed. Specific Heat Capacity and Water | U.S. Geological Survey. Retrieved June 14, 2022, from https://www.usgs.gov/special-topics/water-science-school/science/specific-heat-capacity-and-water#:~:text=Specific%20heat%20is%20defined%20by,water%20compared%20to%20other%20substances.
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