How many times does water expand

This unusual behavior has its origin in the structure of the water molecule. There is a strong tendency to form a network of hydrogen bonds, where each hydrogen atom is in a line between two oxygen atoms.

This hydrogen bonding tendency gets stronger as the temperature gets lower because there is less thermal energy to shake the hydrogen bonds out of position. Information about MathMol can be found here. In the following two pictures, the first shows a typical structure of liquid water, while the second is an ice structure; note the extra open space in the ice.

It is this open solid structure that causes ice to be less dense than liquid water. I leave finding the saturation value to the requester, since google brings it up quite easily.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. How much does water expand when heated, and does salt affect that? Ask Question. Asked 7 years, 2 months ago. Active 3 years, 9 months ago.

Viewed 30k times. This means that ice expands in a uniform amount with each degree of heat you add to it. When ice becomes liquid water, it no longer has fixed linear dimensions, but it has volume. Scientists use a different thermal coefficient -- the coefficient of volume expansion -- to measure the response of liquid water to temperature.

This coefficient, which measures fractional changes in volume per degree Kelvin, is not fixed. It increases with mounting temperature until the water starts boiling.

In other words, liquid water expands at an increasing rate as the temperature goes up. If the pressure P and number of moles of vapor n maintain at a constant, the volume of steam V increases linearly with temperature T. In this equation R is a constant called the ideal gas constant. At its melting point, water exhibits a characteristic shared by no other compound. Instead of continuing to expand in the liquid state, it contracts, and its density increases until it achieves a maximum at 40 F 4 C.

From the melting point to this critical point, the coefficient of expansion is negative, and at the point of maximum density, the coefficient of expansion is 0. If the temperature continues to rise, the coefficient of expansion again becomes positive.