Homework # 2

Due Wednesday 23 September 2009

1. Rapid discharge of a fire extinguisher results in cooling of the gas inside the cylinder. Consider
a fire extinguisher containing 0.1 m3 of CO2 initially at 20 MPa and 300 K. Assume that CO2
is an ideal gas with C̃P = 29 J/(mol K). The valve on the extinguisher can be modeled as an
ideal orifice with molar flow rate given by
∆P
ṅ = C0 a0 f (γ) , (1)
T
where C0 = 0.8 is the orifice coefficient, a0 = 10−3 m2 is the orifice area, ∆P is the difference
between the pressure in the cylinder and the ambient pressure, and f (γ) = 0.5 mol K/s Pa
m2 is the heat capacity function. Assuming that heat transfer to the cylinder is negligible,
develop an expression for the gas pressure in the cylinder as a function of time.

(a) At what time will the pressure in the cylinder be 5 bar?

(b) What will the temperature of the gas in the cylinder be at that time?
(c) Make plots of P versus t and T versus t.

2. Two Hilsch vortex tubes are advertised for sale on e-bay. Both claim to take a stream of
nitrogen at 2.4 bar and 298 K split the stream into two equimolar streams at 1.2 bar, but at
different temperatures. Seller “ntropee” claims his machine will produce streams at 455 and
141 K. Another seller, “karknow” is offering a version that produces streams at 475 and 121 K.
Should I bid on either of these devices? If so, which one and why? Assume for simplicity
that nitrogen is an ideal gas with a constant pressure heat capacity of 29.3 J/(mol K).

3. An elastic hard sphere gas obeys the equation of state

RT
P = (2)
Ṽ − b

where b = 20 cm3 /mol is the second virial coefficient. Compute ∆U , ∆S, ∆H, q, and w, for
compression of this gas from a volume of 600 cm3 /mol to 300 cm3 /mol isothermally at 300 K.