Why can't water molecules have a temperature great than 100 degrees celcius ?

Question

Also..what is happening to the water molecules at the boiling temp. ? Lastly, what happens to the thermal energy as it is transfer from ice to water and water vapor ? thanks in advance for helping

Answer 1

Water cannot have a temperature greater than 100 degrees Celsius because it vaporizes at that point. When it is more than one hundred degrees it must be water vapor. When water is at it's boiling point the molecules are taking in energy and using it to vaporize. This means it's gaining energy of interaction, not kinetic. The thermal energy stays the same during phase change. This is why a glass of ice water is always 0 degrees Celsius and a pot of boiling water is always one hundred.

Answer 2

If by water molecules, you mean H2O molecules, inded they can be at a higher temperature! For example, superheated steam used in power generation plants and chemical process industries is at temperatures ranging from 300 to 500 degrees Celsius. When you heat liquid water at sea level in an open vessel, it starts boiling at approximately 100 degrees Celsius. At higher altitudes or with a vacuum applied, water can and does boil at lower temperatures too! And in a pressure vessel, the boiling temperature goes up!

OK. At the boiling temperature, some of the individual molecules that are having higher kinetic energy break out of the liquid surface and go into the vapor phase. At the same time, some of the molecules from the vapor state are also going back into the liquid phase. Thus, that surface is a highly dynamic interface and is not to be looked as a static entity. The only thing is that when boiling, more number of molecules go into the vapor state than what are going into the liquid state and so the vapor pressure goes on increasing if the system is closed.

When ice is heated, it becomes water and when water is heated, it gets converted to steam. There are intermolecular bonds and they need some energy to be broken. The energy required is known as latent energy (literally means hidden energy) since it doesn't directly increase the kinetic energy of the individual molecules. Similalry, when cooling, the temperature drops till the change of state comes and then stops falling while the latent enegy is taken out of the system and only after that, the temperature starts falling again.

Answer 3

Water molecules do exist at 100C and above. The only special thing about 100C is that's where water, at normal atmospheric pressure, turns from liquid to gas, but the molecules are still in tact.

The process of boiling means that the water molecules are heated to the point where they have enough energy to overcome the forces binding them together. This force is the van der Waals force but the type of force isn't really important here.

The energy required to convert from liquid to vapor is exactly the energy holding the molecules together. This energy can be seen as the heat of vaporization or as the surface tension of the water.

When the atmospheric pressure changes, the boiling point changes as well. I live where the atmospheric pressure is only about 80% of normal (high altitude) our water boils at 95 C because the force of the atmosphere is smaller so it does not squeeze the molecules together as much.

A similar process happens when ice melts to a liquid. In ice, the water molecules form crystals with a very definite order. The bonds between molecules in the crystal state is stronger than the forces in the liquid state. By adding heat, you increase the energy of the molecules until they can overcome the crystal bond, be freed from the crystal and become lliquid.

Answer 4

Water as it approaches 100 deg. C. or 212 deg F. is the boiling point. As water changes from water to steam it will absorb 60 calories. That is where the monster is found in a storm as the steam condenses u must account for the return of the 60 calories. With this kind of energy u can understand why the huge updrafts.

Answer 5

Water can have a temperature greater than 100C, it just will change from a liquid to a gas. When water is heated to the boiling temperature, the water molecules speed up. The thermal energy is converted to kinetic energy, thus the speeding up of the molecules.