Pressure Cookers and Balloons: TL DR (Too Long Didn't Read)

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What Happens When Gas Is Heated?

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.

TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read)

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.

Pressure Cookers and Balloons


A pressure cooker is an example of what happens when you heat a gas (water vapor)
confined to a fixed volume. As the temperature rises, the reading on the pressure
gauge goes up with it until the water vapor starts escaping through the safety valve. If
the safety valve wasn't there, the pressure would keep increasing and would damage
or burst the pressure cooker.

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.

From Gas to Plasma


A gas becomes increasingly energetic and hotter as the temperature rises until, at a
certain point, it becomes a plasma. This occurs at temperatures that occur on the
surface of the sun, about 6,000 degrees Kelvin (10,340 degrees Fahrenheit). The high
heat energy strips the electrons from the atoms in the gas, leaving a mixture of neutral
atoms, free electrons and ionized particles that generates and responds to electro-
magnetic forces. Because of the electrical charges, the particles can flow together as
if they were a fluid, and they also tend to clump together. Because of this peculiar
behavior, many scientists consider a plasma to be a fourth state of matter.

Shielding Gases Used in


Welding
https://www.bakersgas.com/weldmyworld/2011/05/09/shielding-gases-used-in-welding/

Noble Gas Properties


The noble gases are relatively nonreactive. In fact, they are the least reactive
elements on the periodic table. This is because they have a complete valence
shell. They have little tendency to gain or lose electrons. In 1898, Hugo
Erdmann coined the phrase "noble gas" to reflect the low reactivity of these
elements, in much the same way as the noble metals are less reactive than other
metals. The noble gases have high ionization energies and negligible
electronegativities. The noble gases have low boiling points and are all gases at
room temperature.

Summary of Common Properties

 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

lectronegativity is the property of an atom which increases with its tendency to


attract the electrons of a bond. If two bonded atoms have the same
electronegativity values as each other, they share electrons equally in a covalent
bond. Usually, the electrons in a chemical bond are more attracted to one atom
(the more electronegative one) than to the other. This results in a polar covalent
bond. If the electronegativity values are very different, the electrons aren't shared
at all. One atom essentially takes the bond electrons from the other atom,
forming an ionic bond.

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