Specific Heat Calculator

How much heat it takes to warm something up — or how warm it gets from a given amount of heat. Solve for the heat, the mass, the specific heat capacity or either temperature.

ThermochemistryCalorimetryHeat

Inputs

Input examples

Click Solve next to the quantity you want to find: it moves into the result below. Then fill in the others. Heat is positive when it is added (warming) and negative when it is removed (cooling). Pick a material to fill in its specific heat.

Material

Heat q

Mass m

Specific heat c

Start temperature T₁

End temperature T₂

What is Specific Heat?

The specific heat capacity c is the heat needed to warm 1 gram of a substance by 1 degree. Water needs 4.18 J, which is unusually much: that is why the sea warms up slowly in spring and stays warm long into autumn.

Metals have a low specific heat. The same amount of heat that warms a pan of water by a few degrees makes an empty iron pan scorching hot. A temperature difference is the same in kelvin and in degrees Celsius.

The specific heat is not quite constant: it changes with temperature, and jumps when a liquid boils. The graph on the right shows c_p of common fluids at 1 bar.

water4.184 J/(g·K)

iron~9× less than water

1 cal= 4.184 J

ΔT1 K = 1 °C

Heating Graph

temperature

your material

the same mass of water

end point

Result

Enter the values above

Specific Heat vs Temperature

1 bar

Fluid in the graph

Specific Heats

near room temperature, rounded

Substance	J/(g·K)	cal/(g·°C)
Water (liquid)	4.18	1.00
Ice (about −10 °C)	~2.1	~0.50
Olive oil	~1.97	~0.47
Air (constant pressure)	1.005	0.240
Aluminium	0.900	0.215
Glass	~0.84	~0.20
Iron	0.449	0.107
Copper	0.385	0.092
Lead	0.128	0.031

Worked Techniques

Identifying a Metal

Heat a known mass with a known amount of energy and measure the temperature rise. Compare the result with the table.

Example: → aluminium.

Coffee-cup Calorimetry

Run a reaction in water in an insulated cup. The heat it releases warms the water, so the temperature rise tells you the heat of the reaction.

Example:

Heat with a Changing c_p

Over a wide temperature range c_p is not constant. The heat is then the change in enthalpy h; the calculator takes it from CoolProp data when your material is one of the fluids in the graph.

Example: 1 kg water 20 → 120 °C at 1 bar, boiling included: 2633 kJ.

Sources & Verification

References

S. S. Zumdahl & S. A. Zumdahl, Chemistry, 10th ed., Cengage, 2018 — Ch. 6 (Thermochemistry: enthalpy and calorimetry).
D. Halliday, R. Resnick & J. Walker, Fundamentals of Physics, 10th ed., Wiley, 2014 — Ch. 18 (Temperature, Heat, and the First Law of Thermodynamics).
I. H. Bell, J. Wronski, S. Quoilin & V. Lemort, “Pure and Pseudo-pure Fluid Thermophysical Property Evaluation and the Open-Source Thermophysical Property Library CoolProp”, Ind. Eng. Chem. Res. 53 (6), 2498–2508, 2014.