Calorimetry Lab

Calorimetry and Hess's law for introductory (General) chemistry. Drop a hot metal into water and find its specific heat; mix solutions in a coffee-cup calorimeter and work out ΔH per mole; calibrate a bomb calorimeter with benzoic acid and burn fuels; and build a reaction's ΔH from step reactions. Built with SceneryStack; runs offline as a Progressive Web App.

• Specific Heat. Heat a sample (aluminum, iron, copper, silver, lead, or one of two unknowns) in a water bath and drop it into an insulated cup of water. Sample and water temperatures converge on a live chart, heat arrows show the flow, and the calculation shows q = mcΔT for each, with q(sample) = −q(water). With an unknown, students work out c and then reveal the metal. Take the insulation away and the balance shows heat lost to the room.
• Coffee Cup. HCl + NaOH, dissolving five salts (NH₄NO₃, NaOH, CaCl₂, NH₄Cl, KNO₃) or Mg in HCl. Set volumes, concentrations, masses and the starting temperature, then mix. The worked calculation goes ΔT → q(solution) → q(reaction) → n (with the limiting reactant) → ΔH in kJ/mol, compared with the accepted value. Endothermic dissolving visibly cools the cup. A non-ideal cup holds some heat and leaks to the room, so the curve peaks and drifts; the textbook extrapolation back to the moment of mixing is drawn on the chart and recovers ΔH.
• Bomb Calorimeter. Calibrate: burn benzoic acid (26.434 kJ/g) to find the calorimeter constant, which the screen never shows. Measure: burn sucrose, glucose, naphthalene or ethanol with your own C_cal and get ΔcU per gram and per mole, then ΔcH = ΔcU + Δn(gas)RT. The thermometer reads to 0.001 °C.
• Hess's Law. Six puzzles (CO from graphite, graphite to diamond, ΔHf of CH₄ and C₂H₂, 2NO₂ → N₂O₄, S → SO₃). Reverse and multiply each step; the sum strikes out species that cancel, checks the net equation against the target, and adds the ΔH values. An enthalpy ladder diagram draws each step; a second view routes the reaction through the elements with ΔH° = ΣνΔHf°(products) − ΣνΔHf°(reactants).
• Data from the CRC Handbook and the NIST Chemistry WebBook (the values in OpenStax Chemistry 2e, chapter 5 and Appendix G); sources in doc/model.md.
• Accessible: every control is keyboard-operable; dropping, mixing, igniting, reaching equilibrium and solving a puzzle are announced; live screen summaries; keyboard-help dialogs.
• English, French and Spanish; default and projector colour profiles; installable PWA. A preference (or ?calculations=false) hides the worked calculations so students do them.

npm install
npm run icons    # generate PNG icons from public/icons/icon.svg
npm start        # dev server → http://localhost:5173

New sims start at version: "0.0.0" in package.json. Bump only when cutting a release (for example npm version patch and a matching git tag). Keep name in kebab-case; it is separate from the SceneryStack sim identifier in src/init.ts, which reads its version from package.json.

GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 — see OpenLyceum org license.

See OpenLyceum contributing guidelines. Report bugs via GitHub Issues; use org issue templates.