My dad is an engineer and a physicist, he forwarded me this exchange with one of his coworkers:
Tom,
How are you doing?
I have quick question for you.Is the expansion rate of water over temperature up to boiling linear? I read that water expands about 4% at boiling up from room temp. Is this true also?
Jason
Dad’s reply:
Geek Answer……..
It ain’t a quick question since the thermal properties of water are a lot like how a woman’s personality changes with temperature (or a males antics).
It is not linear.Some statistics:
The density versus temperature graph is not a straight line, it is a curve, almost a parabola.
Liquid water has its maximum density at 3.98 degrees C, and expands from that point when it gets hotter and also when it gets colder.
As for expansion, water expands less than 0.1% near freezing and about 0.8% near boiling.
The Total Expansion from boiling to freezing is 4.3% not room temperature as you have quoted.A guaranteed conclusion is that if you put 10 cups of room temperature water into a freezer, you will get 11 cups of ice out (10% increase in volume). So don’t put a top on that beer glass in the freezer.
Another anomaly is that since water starts to freeze from the top down, a soda bottle that necks down to a fit a bottle cap will probably break when it freezes even if the cap is off since water freezes from the top surface downward.This completes the question to which there is no known answer and can be added to your “Encyclopedia of Useless Information”.
If you did have a use for this information, then God bless you!!
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