Kia ora welcome back or welcome to my blog. Today I will be talking about expansion.
We did and experiment for expansion. We set up a Bunsen burner and got a ball and hoop, we heated up the ball over the hoop for one minute, letting it expand. Now that the ball had expanded it would no longer fit inside the hole. We then put the ball under cold water, letting it cool down, now it would fit in the whole.
In the experiment we saw the gradual expansion of the ball whilst over the flame, and then how it got smaller when under the cold water.
The particles of a solid are always slightly vibrating, but when adding heat the particles vibrate harder, bump into each other and move around, causing what we know as expansion.
Some common real life issues with expansion are rail road tracks. Since rail road tracks are made with metal they need space for expansion otherwise the rails will curve, break and crack. To solve that they add small gaps between the rails so they have space to expand in the hot sun.
there is one point where particles will kind of stop vibrating, when at absolute zero or -273.15 degrees Celsius, but they are still ever so slightly vibrating, this is when it’s at a point of not vibrating so much that’s it’s to it’s closed point of stopping, but we’ve never got to that temperature as we do not know what will happen.