“Burn Baby Burn!”
Which type of wood releases the
most heat energy?
By: Dominick Brennan
&
Edward Medina
Hypothesis
We hypothesized that Pine wood will
release the most amount of heat energy.
Research
The purpose of the project is to learn what type of
wood burns fastest and also what type of wood gives
off the most heat energy. This significance is that it
is useful in every day life in many ways. For
example if you were out camping and wanted to
build a campfire you would want to know which
type of wood would burn fastest and warmest. Also,
when heating a house by way of a fireplace you
would want to use the wood that will keep your
house the warmest. Through our experiment you
would know what was the best type of wood to use. Also,
the answer to this question could help the environment
because if people only burned one type of wood, it could
cut down on air pollution.
Other people have tested this experiment. We found one
example of this project online, a student from California did
this experiment as a science fair project, although he did not
test for heat energy. However, he did find that Mulberry
wood burned the fastest and we will keep this in mind when
running our experiments. Another study showed that poplar
burned for the longer period of time and Pine burned the
quickest because the pine has a certain flammable sap
which made it easier to burn. Poplar had no flammable sap
in it. We will also take these factors into consideration.
The theory behind our experiment is wood has a certain
amount of energy stored in its chemical bonds. This energy
is exerted when these materials react with oxygen and are
turned into the combustion products. Chemists use what is
called, the heat of formation as a measure of the energy
stored in these compounds. The energy change associated
with a combustion reaction is the difference between the
energy of the products and the energy of the reactants. The
stronger the bonds in the wood, the more difficult it is to get
the fuel into the gas phase. Also the stronger the bonds are
the stronger the activation energy is. When we use a source
of heat to start a fire, we're supplying the energy that is
needed to overcome the activation energy to begin the
process of combustion. Once the process starts, there needs
to be a continuous source of energy in order for the fire
continues to burn.
The method we plan to use in our experiment is
something we like to call the “Agni Method”, this is
the process of burning a piece wood and recording how
long it took for that individual piece of wood to burn a
certain amount. Also, we will measure the heat energy of
each different piece of wood. We researched how to do
this and we found what he have to use is called a
calorimeter. A colorimeter measures the heat developed
during a mechanical, electrical, or chemical reaction and
used for calculating the heat capacity of materials. We
will use this to measure the heat energy that each piece of
wood exerts. This is an exothermic reaction.
Materials
•
1 piece of 4 different types of wood
1.
2.
3.
4.
•
•
•
•
•
Pine
Poplar
Douglas Fir
Oak
Calorimeter
6 Bricks
Rubbing Alcohol
Liter
Camera
Calorimeter
• Calorimetry is the measurement of the
quantity of heat exchanged. For
example, if the energy from an
exothermic chemical reaction is
absorbed in a container of water, the
change in temperature of the water
provides a measure of the amount of
heat added. Calorimeters are used to
determine the energy content of foods by
burning the foods in an oxygen
atmosphere and measuring the energy
yield in terms of the increase in
temperature of the calorimeter.
Calorimeters can also be used to
measure the specific heat of a substance.
Variables
Controlled
Independent
Amount of rubbing alcohol
applied to each piece of
wood
Type of wood
Dependent
Heat energy released
Procedure
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Gathered all our materials
Set up our experiment area and put together calorimeter
Placed wood in the experiment area
Poured 150ml of rubbing alcohol on the piece of Pine wood
Lit the wood on fire
Recorded our data.
We repeated step three and four for each of the other three
pieces of wood.
We then analyzed our data and came to a conclusion
Data
Graphs
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
Pine
Poplar
Douglas Fir
Oak
Graphs
5500
5000
4500
4000
3500
3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
500
0
Pine
Poplar
Douglas Fir
Oak
Conclusion
Before we started this experiment, we hypothesized
that Pinewood would give off the most heat energy.
After we completed our experiment our data
concluded that our hypothesis was incorrect. We
found that the pinewood actually gave off the least
amount of heat energy. It gave off 2401.6 J of
energy. This was about 600 J less than any other
type of wood that we tested. The wood that gave off
the most heat energy was Douglas Fir wood. The
piece of Douglas Fir that we burned gave off 5403.6
J of heat energy.