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Walter Alvarado (005636642)

Determining the Ideal Gas Constant Introduction: When sodium bicarbonate, sodium carbonate, and aluminum carbonate completely decomposed gas was created and measured in a fixed volume at a high temperature. Several results were recorded and entered into excel. The resulting graphs trendline determined the gas constant R.

Experimental: From the pre-recorded data, a graph was plotted. The gas constant was calculated from the slope of pressure and volume over moles and temperature. The full balanced equations were calculated and a comparison between the known literature values of the gas constant was made.

Results and Discussion:

Gas Constant From PV/nT Slope

10 8 PV (atm*L) 6 4 2 0 0 50 100 nT (mol*(K) 150 NaHCO3, Na2CO3, Al2(CO3)3 y = 0.0655x R = 0.8015

Figure 1 shows the relationship between pressure and volume over moles and temperature.

2 Balanced Equations:

Walter Alvarado (005636642)

( ) ( ) ( ) ( )

( ) ( ) ( )

( ) ( ) ( )

( )

The gas constant was calculated from the slope of the trendline. Sodium bicarbonate, aluminum carbonate, and sodium carbonates calculated gas constant (.0655 L*atm/mol*K) only varied slightly from the known literature value of .0821 L*atm/ mol*K. The variation comes from the assumption that these gasses behaved like ideal gasses. In an ideal gas there are no attractive forces between the molecules and they take up no space. If this were true however no substance would ever condense from the gas state to become liquids and solids and they could compress until they had no volume, which is not true.

Conclusion From the graphed data of the decomposition of sodium bicarbonate, sodium carbonate, and aluminum carbonate the gas constants were calculated to be 0.1233, 0.082, .2551 L*atm/ mol*K respectively.

References Tro, N. Chemistry: A Molecular Approach, First Edition, 2nd ed.; Prentice Hall; Upper Saddle River, 2008.