Professional Documents
Culture Documents
There is no such thing as an ideal gas and some assumptions are made for ideal gas law as a
lot of gases behave approximately if they were ideal at ordinary working temperature and pressure.
Firstly, the absence of the intermolecular forces(or entirely negligible) between the gas molecules.
Secondly, the volume occupied by the molecules is negligible with the volume of the container.
These two assumptions are the main keys which make the ideal gases to be different with real gases.
In ideal gas law, pressure is directly proportional to temperature at constant volume. From
this experiment, the initial volume and the final are the same and we can see there is an increase in
pressure with an increase in temperature. The average kinetic energy and the velocity of gas
particles hitting the wall of the container increases as the temperature increases. However, based on
the results obtained from the experiment, there is a slight difference between m1 and m2. In this
experiment, we use the equation of (equation 2) to verify the equation 1 and in equation 2, m1 must
be equal to m2. Thus, the unequal of the actual result of m1 and m2 obtained could not verify the
equation 1. From the graph plotted, we can see that there are some points are not aligned with the
line of graph of ideal gas law. This is because the gases in this experiment do not meet the
assumption for an ideal gas.
There might be some sources of error causing the m1 to be unequal with m2 in this
experiments. Firstly, the connection between the compressed air supply and the vacuum will cause
leakage of air during the expansion of air to fill both containers. Secondly, the mesurement might
not be accurate due to the old apparatus used. Thirdly, the temperature difference between the
surrounding air and the container might cause heat transfer between them leading to inaccuracy of
final temperature of the containers obtained. High temperature, low pressure, high volume and
existence of little intermolecular forces between gases are the conditions for Ideal Gas Law. Thus,
low temperature and high pressure are the souces of error causing the inccuracy. The gas would not
obey the Ideal Gas Law if the conditions are not fulfilled.
The containers should be insulated so that it would not be affected by the surrouding
temperature. Besides, the connection between container A and container B should be sealed tightly
to reduce the risk of leakage of air to the surrounding.