why does water quickly cool down/melt, but takes a long time to get to room temperature?

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If you turn the heat off of boiling water, it cools down pretty quick, and if you leave ice out, it quickly melts. But once it escapes it’s extreme temperature, it then takes much longer for it to get to room temperature. Why is this? /r/

In: Chemistry

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The rate of heat transfer is directly proportional to the temperature difference the water and it’s surrounding but the energy required to change the water 1 degree is quite constant for liquid water.

The result is that water with a temperature farther away from the surrounding air will change temperature faster.

So if the room is at 25C and you have water at 95 C the difference is 50C.
Then the water cools to 35C the difference is only 10C.
So if it took 1 minute for the water to drop from 95C 94C it will take 50/10=5 times longer to drop from 35C to 34C or 5 minutes.

At 27C the difference is only 2C so a drop to 26C will take 50/2 = 25 times longer or 25 minutes.

Melting ice actually takes quite a long time since it requires 333kj/kg versus 4kj/kg per degree to heat water. So melting ice requires the same energy as to heat 0C water to 333/4=83C.
If you have ice and water in a container all of it will be close to 0C until all ice has melted

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