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A Guide to 3 Simple Heat Conduction Experiments

Last Updated: November 24, 2023 Fact Checked

• Bunsen Burner

This article was co-authored by Bess Ruff, MA . Bess Ruff is a Geography PhD student at Florida State University. She received her MA in Environmental Science and Management from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2016. She has conducted survey work for marine spatial planning projects in the Caribbean and provided research support as a graduate fellow for the Sustainable Fisheries Group. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 182,690 times.

Whether you realize it or not, heat conduction is an important part of our lives. You probably use it every single day when you’re cooking a meal or using a radiator. The transfer of heat from a heat source to an object is basic heat conduction. If you’re looking for a way to test it yourself or explain it to a child there are a few simple experiments you can choose from.

Performing a Heat Conduction Experiment With Hot Water

• You need to get spoons that are relatively long. If you put the spoon in the pot the handle should be coming out of the pot by about three or four inches.
• If you want a precise measurement for heat conduction you can also use thermometers. In that case, you’ll need three thermometers and electrical tape.

• While any pot will work, a shallow, broad pot might help you balance the butter on the spoons more easily.

• If you are using thermometers to measure the heat conduction, tape the thermometers to the handles of each spoon before you put them in the water.

• Metal conducts heat better than wood, which conducts heat better than plastic.
• If you are using thermometers, check your thermometer readings after a few minutes. The same results will appear with specific numbers.

Performing a Heat Conduction Experiment With a Balloon

• The balloon pops because the candle heated up the balloon, which weakened the balloon.

• The candle is warming the water rather than popping the balloon. That’s why water isn’t going flying everywhere. The balloon conducts heat and is able to transfer it to the water without damaging the balloon.
• If you hold the candle to the balloon long enough it will pop, but it will take much longer than a balloon filled without air.

Performing a Heat Conduction Experiment With a Bunsen Burner

• You can buy wax and metal tacks at a craft store.

• You should have six tacks connected to the metal rod in all.

• If you have heat resistant gloves and no other way to secure the metal rod over the burner, you can hold the rod there. Keep a steady hand.

• This experiment illustrates how metal conducts heat. You can visualize how one end of the metal rod got hot rather than the entire rod heating up at an equal pace. This is based on where the Bunsen burner was placed. If you placed the burner in the middle of the rod, the heat would start in the middle and extend outwards in either direction. [11] X Research source

Community Q&A

• Use Eye protection if you're handling a Bunsen burner. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0
• Handle the Bunsen burner with care. Place on a safety flame when not heating. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://www.stemlittleexplorers.com/en/heat-conduction-experiment/
• ↑ https://coolscienceexperimentshq.com/conducting-heat/
• ↑ https://www.abc.net.au/science/surfingscientist/pdf/teachdemos_7.pdf
• ↑ https://www.scienceworld.ca/resource/fireproof-balloons/
• ↑ http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ExperimentOnHeatConduction/

About This Article

Heat conduction occurs when heat transfers from a source to an object. You can perform an experiment that shows heat conduction using a pot of water and spoons. Start by bringing a large pot of water to a boil and then removing it from the heat. Then, place 1 wooden spoon, 1 plastic spoon, and 1 metal spoon in the water so the bowl on each spoon is sticking up out of the water and resting on the side of the pot. Place a slice of butter into each of the spoon bowls and wait a few minutes. When you check the spoons, you'll notice that the butter is more melted in the metal spoon than it is in the wooden and plastic spoons. This is because metal conducts heat better than wood and plastic. You'll also notice that the butter is more melted in the wooden spoon than in the plastic spoon, since wood conducts heat better than plastic. To learn how to do a heat conduction experiment with a balloon, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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Science Experiments

Conducting Heat Science Experiment

Which material conducts heat better, wood, plastic, or metal? In this experiment, we learn about conducting heat and how various materials conduct heat differently.

Note: Although the materials for this experiment are easy to find, one of the materials is boiling hot water. Depending on the age of your children the help of an adult is important. See our demonstration video and printable instructions below.

JUMP TO SECTION:   Instructions  |  Video Tutorial  |  How it Works

Supplies Needed

• Small Glass Bowl
• Three Spoons (1 made out of wood, 1 made out of plastic and 1 made out of metal)
• Boiling Water

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Conducting Heat Science Experiment Instructions

Step 1 – Begin by positioning 3 spoons in a small glass bowl.

Step 2 – Place a small pat of butter at the top of each spoon.

Step 3 – Put a bead in each pat of butter.

Step 4 – Carefully pour hot boiling water into the bowl until it is almost completely full. Be careful not to allow the spoons to fall into the bowl.

Step 5 – Watch carefully to see what happens to the beads. Write down your observations. Did all the beads behave the same? Do you know why? Find out the answer in the how does this experiment work section below.

Helpful Tip: You will likely need to watch the experiment for 5-10 minutes before anything happens.

Video Tutorial

How Does the Science Experiment Work

Heat can move in three ways: conduction, convection and radiation. In this experiment, the heat was transferred by means of conduction.

Conduction is the transfer of heat from one particle of matter to another without the movement of matter itself. As matter is heated, the particles that make up the matter begin to move faster.

In this experiment when we placed the spoons in the boiling water, the fast-moving water particles collide with the slow-moving spoon particles. As a result of the collision between the water particles and spoon particles, the particles of the spoon begin to move faster and the metal spoon becomes hotter. As the metal spoon gets hotter, the butter begins to melt and the bead slides down the spoon.

Why did the bead slide down the metal spoon faster than the wooden spoon or plastic spoon? Metal is a good conductor of heat, while wood and plastic are good insulators . A conductor transfers thermal energy (heat) well, while an insulator does not transfer thermal energy (heat) well.

I hope you enjoyed the experiment. Here are some printable instructions:

Instructions

• Begin my positioning 3 spoons in a small glass bowl.
• Place a small pat of butter at the top of each spoon
• Put a bead in each pat of butter
• Carefully pour hot boiling water into the bowl until it is almost completely full. Be careful not to allow the spoons to fall into the bowl.
• Watch carefully to see what happens to the beads. Note: You will likely need to watch the experiment for 5-10 minutes before anything happens.

Reader Interactions

March 5, 2019 at 6:35 am

Dear CoolScienceExperimentsHQ,

Thank you so much for sharing this, this really-really helped me and my group out on our science experiment on conduction and convection! Again i have to say thank you for this.

~a grateful 7th grader

May 5, 2023 at 7:53 pm

yes i agree with you this was very helpful and it looks fun to make.

May 10, 2023 at 3:59 am

same with me lol but for yr 8

February 2, 2024 at 11:42 am

I have not tried this experiment yet but, based on the comments so far I can be almost sure that it will work thanks for being super awesome scientists -A 5th grader that hopes to be grateful in the future

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Heat conduction in a metal rod

• copper rods, several for a class, approx. 30cm long, or other metal that conducts heat well
• kettle of recently boiled water

Space the metal rods out around the circle of students, and ask the students to touch a metal rod and feel how warm it is. (You may need to ask them not to hold them as warmth from their hand heats up the rod.) Gather up the rods, briefly dip them in the kettle of recently boiled hot water, then lay out again. Ask the students to briefly (copper metal heats up very fast) touch the end that was in the water. Students may also explore and feel the end of the rod that was not in the water, and the centre of the rod, and notice differences along the rod. They may also notice that after a short while, the whole rod will cool down again. Discuss what is happening in terms of heat: The molecules of water moved around faster as they were heated up. (Video of molecule movement in a liquid as it is heated: http://www.middleschoolchemistry.com/multimedia/chapter1/lesson2 .) These faster moving water molecules transfer energy to the metal rod where they are touching. The energy from the hot water makes the molecules of the metal rod move faster, which we can feel as the rod heating up. The heat spreads up the rod as the faster molecules at the end of the rod bump into adjacent molecules and give them energy too - so the middle of the rod (even though it was not touching the water) got warmer as well. Eventually the molecules lose their heat energy to the air and the rod cools down again. The movement of heat when molecules transfer energy between each other by colliding with each other is called “conduction”.

ingridscience afterschool used a large copper rod in a campfire to feel conduction

Eight metal rods protrude from a metal hub. One rod is used to support the hub above a Méker burner. The other rods are nickel, nickel silver, iron (two rods of different diameter), copper, brass and aluminum. (Nickel silver, perhaps best known as “German silver,” is a family of alloys that contain copper, nickel and zinc, sometimes with small amounts of other metals such as lead, manganese and iron). All rods are 1/4″ in diameter and about 5-9/16″ long, except for one iron rod, which is twice the diameter of the other rods (1/2″, but the same length). These are labeled on the hub, respectively, “NI,” “NIAG,” “FE,” “FE,” “CU,” “BR,” and “AL.” Stuck to the ends of the rods by means of wax are small steel balls. When you place the lighted burner beneath the hub, the rods conduct the heat away from the hub until their far ends become hot enough to melt the wax that is holding the balls. Exactly how long this takes depends on the height of the hub above the burner, and on the size of the flame, but typical times are (in minutes and seconds): Cu, 1:06; Al, 1:19; brass, 2:17; Fe (1/2″), 3:48; Fe (1/4″), 4:09; NiAg, 4:50 and Ni, 10:03.

If we take a piece of material whose cross-sectional area is A and thickness is Δ x , with a temperature difference between its faces, we find that heat flows between the two faces, in a direction perpendicular to the faces. The time rate of heat flow, Δ Q /Δ t , for small Δ T and small Δ x , is proportional to A (Δ T /Δ x ). In the limit of infinitesimal thickness dx , with temperature difference dT , this becomes H = - kA ( dT/ dx ), where H (= dQ / dt ) is the time rate of heat flow through the area A , dT / dx is the temperature gradient across the material, and k , the proportionality constant, is the thermal conductivity of the material. People often use the Greek letter κ to represent this constant. The minus sign is there because heat flows from the side at higher temperature to the one at lower temperature.

We now take a rod of material of length L and (constant) cross-sectional area A in which heat flow has reached a steady state. In this situation, the temperature at each point in the rod does not vary with time, so H is the same at all cross-sections of the rod. This means, by the equation above, that dT / dx is also constant, and the temperature difference along the rod is linear with distance and is - dT / dx = ( T 2 - T 1 )/ L . Thus, H = kA ( T 2 - T 1 )/ L .

In this demonstration, we do not maintain a constant temperature difference between the ends of the rods, and the situation is perhaps complicated by heat loss through radiation, but it does provide a graphic illustration of how a material’s thermal conductivity affects the rate of heat transfer through it.

Heat flows in a direction perpendicular to the faces of our piece of material (or to the ends of the rod), and opposite to that of the temperature gradient. This flow may thus be expressed as a vector, and we may also generalize it to blocks of material shaped differently from the slab we started with. To do this, we first define the vector h , whose magnitude at a point is the amount of thermal energy per time, and per unit surface area, that passes through an infinitesimal surface element situated at right angles to the direction of flow. Its direction is the direction of the flow. If we call the energy flow per time, per area Δ J , and the surface element Δ A , then h = (Δ J /Δ A ) e f , where e f is a unit vector in the direction of flow.

Now we take the slab of material that we started with, but imagine it as a tiny piece of a larger block of material, sitting between and parallel to two isothermal surfaces. (In this case, the equation above, for the rod, becomes J = κ A ( T 2 - T 1 ) / d , where we’ve used κ instead of k for the thermal conductivity, and d is the distance between the surfaces (instead of L for length).) Now, if we take Δ A as the area of our slab, and Δ s as the thickness, the heat flow per time is Δ J = κΔ T (Δ A /Δ s ). We can write this as Δ J /Δ A = κ(Δ T /Δ s ). The left side is the magnitude of h , and Δ T /Δ s is the temperature gradient. Since it is oriented perpendicular to the isothermal surfaces, it is a maximum, and thus the magnitude of ∇ T , and we have h = - κ∇ T .

We now turn back to our demonstration. From the times given above, we would rank the various metals according to their thermal conductivities, from greatest to lowest: Cu, Al, brass, Fe, NiAg and Ni. The different times for the two iron rods, of course, arise from their different diameters. The 1/2″-diameter rod conducts more heat per time than the 1/4″-diameter rod because of its larger cross-sectional area.

In this analysis, we have ignored the heat capacity of the metal rods, the amount of heat necessary to raise their temperature by a particular amount. Since one iron rod is twice the diameter of the other, it has four times the cross-sectional area, and thus should conduct heat four times as fast. It also has, however, four times the mass of the other rod, and so requires four times as much heat to raise its temperature by the same amount. These factors thus largely cancel, and it takes almost the same amount of time for the ends of the two rods to reach the melting point of the wax.

From the equations above, we find that the SI units of thermal conductivity, κ, are J/s·m·C°, or W/m·C°. Some typical values, from Goodfellow (a supplier of metals, alloys, polymers, ceramics and glasses for research, home page http://www.goodfellow.com ; search for information here ; once you have found the material, click on the tab labeled “Thermal Properties”) are listed in the table below. Also given are heat capacities, C, in J/g·C°. Except for those for brass and nickel silver, these are from The Engineering Toolbox . The heat capacities for brass and nickel silver (Cu 62/Ni 15/Zn 22) are from Engineers Edge .

The demonstration results above are in rough agreement with most of these values, except for the last two, NiAg and Ni. It could be that our NiAg sample is not of the same composition as the one in the table, and that our nickel sample is not pure. (It is not likely that they are switched, as the nickel rod is attracted by a magnet, but the nickel silver rod is not.) Also, κ can change with temperature, and depending on how greatly it changes for the various materials at the temperatures we use in this demonstration, our results may differ from what we might expect from the tabulated values.

References:

1) Resnick, Robert and Halliday, David. Physics, Part One, Third Edition (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1977), pp. 480-482. 2) Feynman, Richard P., Leighton, Robert B. and Sands, Matthew. The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume II, Mainly Electromagnetism and Matter (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1963) 2-3, 2-8 to 2-9.