How can you change the specific heat capacity of water?

1 Answer
Truong-Son N.
Oct 1, 2017

You can't change the specific heat capacity of water. It is intrinsically a characteristic of the substance we call water. The only way to increase it (assuming liquid only) is to:

  • Drastically increase the temperature of the water. Even then, it hardly varies.
  • Somehow strengthen its capacity for hydrogen-bonding. [I have no idea how anyone would do this...]
  • Look at a different substance.

This graph shows the variation of the specific heat capacity of water (in #"J/mol"cdot"K"#) with temperature (in #"K"#).

[http://webbook.nist.gov/

At #"400 K"#, you would have increased its specific heat capacity by only #1.8%# from where it is at #"298 K"#.

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