Why is a piece of ice more effective when cooling water?

Answer 1

More effective than what?

Ice is a good coolant because it is easy to move around. You can pop a cube out of your freezer and pop it into your drink or whatever. Very easy, very handy.

When ice melts, it takes a fair amount of heat (the heat of fusion) to break apart the solid crystal structure of the ice. This heat comes from the liquid in your drink, so the drink cools down.

Answer 2

Compared to what? You have to have to things for one of them to be more than the other.

Compared to pouring it over chilled aluminium it's not very effective because the ice doesn't take in heat very fast. If I was cooling bulk liquid I'd aim to keep my heat exchanger just on the warm side of freezing so that I didn't have any ice accumulating and reducing my efficiency.

Answer 3

I am assuming you want to compare ice cooling water as opposed to cooling another liquid? If so, ice would cool any polar liquid well, as it will dissolve or be dissolved into the polar liquid spreading out, and absorbing as much heat as possible from the liquid. If the ice is used to cool a non polar liquid such as oil, the the ice, as it melts is unable to easily mix with the oil, and so it absorption of heat is crippled.

Answer 4

Because to melt ice (assuming theice it at 0degC) requires about 80cal/g which is the same amount of heat as needed to cool 1g of water by 80deg. So, a lump of ice weighing 1g put into a drink is as good as adding 80g water at 0degC in terms of cooling the drink.

Answer 5

this is due to latent heat of fusion.ice at 0 degree contains lower thermal energy than cold water at 0 degrees.when difference in energy is more between the 2 substances(ice and the substance to be cooled)the rate of transfer of heat from substance to ice is faster thereby decreasing thermal energy of the substance faster

Answer 6

because its cold...