Steam Burns [ENDORSED]
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Steam Burns
Can someone please reexplain why steam causes more severe burns than boiling water? Thanks!
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Re: Steam Burns [ENDORSED]
If you recall on the first day of lecture, the sub taught us about the basics of physical or phase change of water from a solid, liquid, and finally a gas. To get to a certain state, change in heat is required. Let's say we have some hot water that's coming to a boil and its at 30 degrees Celsius( taking from the example in class). It needs 2/3 more of the way to reach boiling point and to get the liquid from 0 to 100 it needs a total of 7.5KJ. So in this case it will take ~5KJ to get to boiling water. As of now if you touched boiling water you'd take in ~5KJ which is pretty hot but steam needs an additional ~41KJ to be steam. That is a lot of heat that is taken in. So for that reason steam causes more sever burns because you take in more heat (~46KJ) than boiling water would because the 5 from the boiling water and 41 from the steam.
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