CENCO® AP Physics Lab 2.02: Determining the Temperature of a Flame

Use a calorimetric technique to determine the temperature of a Bunsen burner flame.

Introducing the new CENCO AP Physics lab series!

Ideal for AP Physics 1 and 2, AP Physics C, IB DP Physics, and advanced/honors physics courses, each of the 35 experiments is aligned with the revised College Board AP curriculum. These innovative labs go way beyond traditional exercises, turning real-world scenarios into true guided-inquiry investigations. Students are given a goal, but the investigation is driven by their ideas. As they draw conclusions, students report their results using the Claim-Evidence-Reasoning model. The teacher guides and student manuals are authored and reviewed by AP Physics teachers with decades of combined experience, so you can trust the setups to be successful in your classroom. All labs come complete with instructions and materials for one lab group of 2 to 4 students. For your convenience, labs are packaged to allow you to purchase only what is required for each experiment.

Typical heat transfer calorimetry experiments use heated metal and cool water to verify the specific heat capacity of the metal. This innovative guided-inquiry experiment turns that exercise on its head to determine the temperature of a Bunsen burner flame. In part 1 of the experiment, students probe the flame to find the hottest part of the flame and establish lower and upper bounds for its temperature. In part 2, they heat a piece of steel in the flame and determine the amount of heat transferred to the water, thus calculating its initial temperature. Perhaps most importantly, built into this lab is an opportunity for students to evaluate and solve problems with their experimental design – an essential science skill that is often overlooked in traditional exercises.