Chemical bonding word problem

Question

Somebody help? I’m stuck with this question

Warm desert winds sweep into your hotel room in Marrakech. The air conditioning has broken down and you have a very hard time sleeping due to the heat. You will receive tips from the receptionist to wet some towels and hang them in front of the window and over chairs in the room. Is this tip worth trying? Will the wet towels lower the temperature in the hotel room? Explain your answer based on chemical bonding.

a long answer would be much appreciated thank you 🙏

Answer 1

Yes, this will lower the temperature of the air in the hotel room. It is a very simple version of something called a "swamp cooler."

Thermal energy is a matter of atoms and molecules colliding with one another. The hotter something is against your skin, the harder its atoms are colliding with your skin. This means that taking heat out of something, like the air, is a matter of giving the atoms in that thing something else to collide with that can take the hit. One way of having something take a hit is if it has lots of bonds that can be broken apart easily. Having a material with lots of weak or medium-strength bonds that can break is a lot like the effect that tear-away panels have in professional racing cars: because the panels come off the car easily, the energy that it takes to tear them off the car is energy that--in the event of a crash--does not go towards slamming the driver onto things inside the car's cabin or crushing the cabin around the driver.

Water is an excellent candidate for taking thermal energy away from other materials because the attraction between water molecules--which comes from the partial positive charges on the hydrogens of each molecule being attracted to the partial negative charges on the oxygens of other water molecules around it--are weak to middle-strength bonds, and each water molecule can form up to 4 of them. This means that there are many such bonds in every sample of water, so it can absorb a lot of thermal energy per gram.