My Science Fair Project Abstract

A calorie is a unit of energy. One calorie can lift a 70 kilogram (155-pound) person into the air 6 meters. Sugar in a different source of energy is more powerful than dynamite. I know two calorimeter types. A can calorimeter and a bomb calorimeter. The point of a calorimeter is to see how much energy is in foods. A bomb calorimeter is like a can calorimeter although you blow up the food instead of burning it. You dry the food up for the bomb calorimeter and you grind it up so it doesn't have to use up some of the heat energy to get the moisture out. Then you use pressured oxygen and it's shielded by a steel dome with a water bath.

A can calorimeter is put on a ring stand and you use a clamp to hold your food in place. Then you burn the food and however much the temperature of the water rises is how much energy was in the food.

We burned ten different kinds of food. We burned cherry sours, apple, carrot, Pirate Booty popcorn, Mentos candy, Fiber One granola bar, peanuts, pistachios, provolone cheese, and a Hershey bar. I only picked foods that I liked. First we had to get the supplies. Then we weighed the foods in grams. We used gram weights. We used a balance scale. We burned one food at a time. The food that took the longest to burn was the Fiber One granola bar. The Fiber One granola bar burned for exactly 16 minutes and 5 seconds. The provolone cheese had some reactions that looked like a sparkler. It shot out blue sparks. The provolone cheese stinked the most.

I was surprised that the peanuts raised the temperature from around 15 or 16 degrees up to around 95 degrees Celsius. One hundred degrees Celsius is boiling. Even though the pistachios didn't reach 100 degrees Celsius, they still boiled.

There are two different kinds of calories. Science calories with a little "c" and food Calories with a big "C." One food Calorie is worth 1000 science calories. It takes 4200 joules to make up for one food Calorie. You use joules to figure out how much energy is in foods and how much work you can do with a certain amount of energy.

The carrot was the most fun food to burn. It was the easiest to do. The chocolate was kind of hard. The pistachios I did for a little bit, and oh, they lit on fire so easily!

I wrote observations about the foods we burned. I wrote the observations myself. I wrote about what I learned while doing the experiment. I memorized how to spell chocolate and observations. I'll tell you how to spell chocolate: c-h-o-c-o-l-a-t-e. I also thought of the hypotheses by myself. I guessed that the slower a food burned, the more energy it would have. I was right. I wrote all the foods that we were going to test. I wrote a list of supplies we needed. I wrote the numbers in the tables. I did all the measuring for the experiment. I measured how long the foods burned. I measured their weight before they were burned and after they burned. I measured the water temperature, too. The coldest it ever got was 15 degrees Celsius. I measured 50 ml of water. Every time we burned a food, I had to get fresh water.

My mom made the tables on the computer. Mom printed the papers for my display board.
Mom made the books and lists of websites we used.

The hardest part of the project was writing. It's hard for me to do that much writing. The experiment was easy for me to do.

If I do this experiment again, I would use a candle instead of a lighter so we wouldn't run out of fuel right in the middle of the experiment! I would use a different calorimeter to get a more accurate answer. This calorimeter let some of the heat out through and into the air. Next time I would try the foods a few times to see if it actually burns that long, and to see if the flame was hotter or colder. I would test out marshmallows next time. I could use different kinds of nuts next time, like Brazil nuts, walnuts, coconuts, and macademia nuts. That would be interesting. I would measure the water level at the beginning and the ending of the experiment if we did the experiment again because that could affect our answer. It takes energy to make the water evaporate and I would need to measure that energy.