Teaching Science can only be successful if we are able to answer the challenges of the 21st century. Teaching Physics, Chemistry and Biology with the traditional methods is unintelligible and considered unnecessary for most students. This situation needs to be changed. Students can only develop their abilities and skills to the full extent and can…

One of the pitfalls of engineering education is to lose the physical insight of the problem while tackling the mathematical part. Forced convection heat transfer (the Graetz-Nusselt problem) certainly falls into this category. The equation of energy together with the equation of motion leads to a partial differential equation subject to various…

A simple and inexpensive method to determine the enthalpy of vaporization of liquids by measuring vapor pressure as a function of temperature is described. The vapor pressures measured with the stopcock cell were higher than the literature values and those measured with the sidearm rubber septum cell were both higher and lower than literature…

The study describes the various thermal equilibrium conditions, which should be taken care for while designing or selecting the plastic and glass microscale containers for physical chemistry experiments. The results show that the thermal equilibrium completely depends on the material of the container for the same volume and thickness.

In first-year general chemistry undergraduate courses, thermodynamics and thermal properties such as melting points and changes in enthalpy ([Delta]H) and entropy ([Delta]S) of phase changes are frequently discussed. Typically, classical calorimetric methods of analysis are used to determine [Delta]H of reactions. Differential scanning calorimetry…

This article develops a general thermodynamic treatment to predict the direction of shift in a chemical equilibrium when it is subjected to a stress. This treatment gives an inequality that relates the change in the perturbed variable and the change that the equilibrium shift produces in the conjugated variable. To illustrate the generality of…

We present a laboratory procedure, suitable for high school and undergraduate students, for preparing and studying propane clathrate hydrate. Because of their gas storage potential and large natural deposits, gas clathrate hydrates may have economic importance both as an energy source and a transportation medium. Similar to pure ice, the gas…

The environmental fate and behavior of different organic pollutants based on the qualitative analysis of thermodynamic and kinetic data is presented. The Fugacity model allows the use of different partition constants in an easy way, to determine the distribution of chemical between different phases in equilibrium of an environmental system.

The motion of a particle in a medium is dealt with either as a problem of mechanics or as a transport process in non-equilibrium statistical physics. The two kinds of approach are often unrelated as they are taught in different textbooks. The aim of this paper is to highlight the link between the mechanical and statistical treatments of particle…

Recently, a high school Science Club generated a large number of questions involving temperature. Therefore, they decided to construct a thermal gradient apparatus in order to conduct a wide range of experiments beyond the standard "cookbook" labs. They felt that this apparatus could be especially useful in future ninth-grade biology classes, in…

Chemists have used computational science methodologies for a number of decades and their utility continues to be unabated. For this reason we developed an advanced lab in computational chemistry in which students gain understanding of general strengths and weaknesses of computation-based chemistry by working through a specific research problem.…

A laboratory exercise was developed by using variable temperature powder X-ray diffraction (XRD) to determine [alpha] for MgO (periclase)and was tested in the Applied Physical Chemistry and Materials Characterization Laboratories at James Madison University. The experiment which was originally designed to provide undergraduate students with a…

A model of a thermodynamic system is described in which particles (representing atoms) interact with one another, the surroundings, and the earth's gravitational field according to the principles of classical mechanics. The system's energy "E" and internal energy "U" are defined. The importance is emphasized of the dependence of energy and work on…

This paper presents the development and implementation of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) in an engineering thermodynamics course at Kettering University. In this project, the thermodynamics course was restructured as modules presenting practical applications first, whereas principles were introduced just-in-time and as encountered. Theoretical…

The surface-to-volume ratio is an important quantity in thermal physics. For example it governs the behaviour of heating or cooling of physical objects as a function of size like, e.g. cubes or spheres made of different material. The starting point in our paper is the simple physics problem of how cheese cubes of different sizes behave if heated…