Volumetric heat capacity
Overview
Heat capacity
Heat capacity , or thermal capacity, is the measurable physical quantity that characterizes the amount of heat required to change a substance's temperature by a given amount...
, describes the ability of a given volume
Volume
Volume is the quantity of three-dimensional space enclosed by some closed boundary, for example, the space that a substance or shape occupies or contains....
of a substance to store internal energy
Internal energy
In thermodynamics, the internal energy is the total energy contained by a thermodynamic system. It is the energy needed to create the system, but excludes the energy to displace the system's surroundings, any energy associated with a move as a whole, or due to external force fields. Internal...
while undergoing a given temperature
Temperature
Temperature is a physical property of matter that quantitatively expresses the common notions of hot and cold. Objects of low temperature are cold, while various degrees of higher temperatures are referred to as warm or hot...
change, but without undergoing a phase change. It is different from specific heat capacity in that the VHC depends on the volume of the material, while the specific heat is based on the mass
Mass
Mass can be defined as a quantitive measure of the resistance an object has to change in its velocity.In physics, mass commonly refers to any of the following three properties of matter, which have been shown experimentally to be equivalent:...
of the material. If given a specific heat value of a substance, one can convert it to the VHC by multiply
Multiplication
Multiplication is the mathematical operation of scaling one number by another. It is one of the four basic operations in elementary arithmetic ....
ing the specific heat by the density
Density
The mass density or density of a material is defined as its mass per unit volume. The symbol most often used for density is ρ . In some cases , density is also defined as its weight per unit volume; although, this quantity is more properly called specific weight...
of the substance.
Dulong
Pierre Louis Dulong
Pierre Louis Dulong was a French physicist and chemist, remembered today largely for the law of Dulong and Petit. He worked on the specific heat capacity and the expansion and refractive indices of gases....
and Petit
Alexis Thérèse Petit
Alexis Thérèse Petit was a French physicist. Petit is known for his work on the efficiencies of air- and steam-engines, published in 1818...
predicted in 1818 that ρcp would be constant for all solids.
