Pressure Cookers and Balloons: TL DR (Too Long Didn't Read)
Pressure Cookers and Balloons: TL DR (Too Long Didn't Read)
Pressure Cookers and Balloons: TL DR (Too Long Didn't Read)
Over a period of centuries and through multiple experiments, physicists and chemists
have been able to relate key characteristics of a gas, including the volume it occupies
(V) and the pressure it exerts on its enclosure (P), to temperature (T). The ideal gas
law is a distillation of their experimental findings. It states that PV = nRT, where n is
the number of moles of the gas and R is a constant called the universal gas constant.
This relationship shows that, when pressure is constant, volume increases with
temperature, and when volume is constant, pressure increases with temperature. If
neither is fixed, they both increase with increasing temperature.
When you heat a gas, both its vapor pressure and the volume it occupies increase.
The individual gas particles become more energetic and the temperature of the gas
increases. At high temperatures, the gas turns into a plasma.
When you increase the temperature of a gas in a balloon, the pressure increases, but
this only serves to stretch the balloon and increase the volume. As the temperature
continues to rise, the balloon reaches its elastic limit and can no longer expand. If the
temperature keeps going up, the increasing pressure bursts the balloon.
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Heat Is Energy
A gas is a collection of molecules and atoms with enough energy to escape the forces
that bond them together in the liquid or solid states. When you enclose a gas in a
container, the particles collide with each other and with the walls of the container. The
collective force of the collisions exerts pressure on the container walls. When you heat
the gas, you add energy, which increases the kinetic energy of the particles and the
pressure they exert on the container. if the container weren't there, the extra energy
would induce them to fly larger trajectories, effectively increasing the volume they
occupy.
The addition of heat energy also has a microscopic effect on the particles that
constitute a gas as well as on the macroscopic behavior of the gas as a whole. Not
only does the kinetic energy of each particle increase, but its internal vibrations and
the speeds of rotation of its electrons do too. Both effects, combined with the increase
in kinetic energy, make the gas feel hotter.
Fairly nonreactive
Complete outer electron or valence shell (oxidation number = 0)
High ionization energies
Very low electronegativities
Low boiling points (all monatomic gases at room temperature)
No color, odor, or flavor under ordinary conditions (but may form colored
liquids and solids)
Nonflammable
At low pressure, they will conduct electricity and fluoresce