Can you please help me solve this problem

Question

On a 5 day wilderness expedition you'll need to heat 5.0 kg of water to the boiling point each day. The air temperature will average 25 °C. You have available canisters of compressed butane (CH10) fuel, which you'll burn to heat the water. Each canister has 100. g of butane in it. What is the minimum number of fuel canisters you must bring?

The standard heat of formation of butane at 25 °C is - 125.7 kJ/mol. You'll probably find other helpful data in the ALEKS Data resource.

Answer 1

Here's the thought process when solving this problem. Here, I'm assuming that all of the energy spent by burning the butane goes to heating the water, and the butane burns completely yielding water and carbon dioxide.

Find how much energy is needed to heat 25kg of water (side note - it doesn't matter if you heat 25kg water from 25°C once or 5kg water from 25°C five times; it's the same energy requirement).

Then, see how much butane would need to be burnt to fill that energy requirement. To do that, you need to set up a balanced equation for the burning of butane (I'll let you do that). Bring in the standard heats of formation for every molecule involved from your ALEKS Data resource, get the energy output of burning one mol of butane, convert 1 mol to grams, then adjust proportionally to the energy requirement. Don't forget that you have a discrete number of cans, so keep that in mind.

Hope that helps!