Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures
The partial pressure of an ideal gas in a mixture is equal to the pressure it would exert if it occupied the same volume alone at the same temperature. This is because ideal gas molecules are so far apart that they don't interfere with each other at all. Actual real-world gases come very close to this ideal.
A consequence of this is that the total pressure of a mixture of ideal gases is equal to the sum of the partial pressures of the individual gases in the mixture as stated by Dalton's law. For example, given an ideal gas mixture of nitrogen (N2), hydrogen (H2) and ammonia (NH3):
| where: | |
| = total pressure of the gas mixture | |
| = partial pressure of nitrogen (N2) | |
| = partial pressure of hydrogen (H2) | |
| = partial pressure of ammonia (NH3) |
Read more about this topic: Partial Pressure
Famous quotes containing the words law, partial and/or pressures:
“Courts of law, and all the paraphernalia and folly of law ... cannot be found in a rational state of society.”
—Robert Owen (1771–1858)
“America is hard to see.
Less partial witnesses than he
In book on book have testified
They could not see it from outside....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)