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The duration of cooling icecubes

I have encountered a question while pouring myself a glass of room temperature soda, then adding icecubes to cool it down. Is there a direct duration to which icecubes cool liquids? or are there variables as well? Take an example of a soda at room temperature of 23.9 degrees celcius. In a glass with 225 mililiters. If four icecubes are deposited in the glass immediately after coming out of a freezer with a temperature of -5 degrees celcius, what is the approzimate cooling time, or are there still more variables involved?

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  • Asked by ln64z3
  • on 2011-01-06 11:52:00
  • Member status
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Categories: Domestic Science.

Tags: ice, soda.

 

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Jon-Richfield says:

 

It is not so much a question of time as of quantities of heat and of heat flow along gradients of temperature. The cooler the ice cubes the more heat they can absorb apart from how much latent heat of melting they can absorb. The hotter the water the faster it will convey its heat by conduction and convestion, and the more heat it can contribute to the ice or the ice-cooled water. The hotter the surrounding air, the faster it will heat the water, causing the ice to melt correspondingly faster.

Your question is rather like asking how long it will take  a car to roll downhill if one adds more weight to the vehicle or increases the slope; there are so many variables such as rolling resistance and the state of the road surface and tyres, that the question is not directly answerable, even if one knows the mass of the car and the height of the hill.

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posted on 2011-01-06 12:03:00 | Report abuse


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Jon-Richfield says:

This space to let!

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posted on 2011-01-06 12:04:23 | Report abuse


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Georg says:

The

heat transfer from a liquid to its solid form (called "melting")

is very fast.

In practice it is limited by the speed with which the melted

cold water is mixed with the rest.

So stirring and the surface area of the ice are the most important factor.

Under typical conditions of a drink, all other factors like

the temperature of the ice (blelow zero C) and so on

are secondary. The heat of melting for ice is 80 cal/g ,

whereas the specific heat of ice 0 .5 cal/gdeg is small,

and the heat conduction from inside the ice cube is slow.

So a ice cube of 1 g and say, - 10 degrees C supplies 5 cal when

heated from -10 to 0 degrees, whereas the same amount of ice will 

take on 80 cal when melting at 0 degrees!

The melting occurs instantously at the surface,

the heat taken from the liquid is limited by the

dispersion of the melted ice into the drink.

Georg

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posted on 2011-01-09 13:03:05 | Report abuse


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