The barometric height equation

Ben-Eben de Klerk August 18, 2011

Abstract
The Barometric height equation((h) = 0 e kT ), which is a direct consequence of the ideal gas law, was experimentally tested by using a mechanical gas in a simulated gas column. The expected linear relationship between ln() , and h was conrmed using a linear regression model. The correlation coecient was always above 0.992 for driving frequencies 25 Hz, 35 Hz, 45 Hz and 55 Hz, implying a very strong linear relationship. The eective temperature of the mechanical gas system was calculated to be within the range T = 1.20.31019 K at 25 Hz, and T = 4.0 0.16 1019 K at 55 Hz. A linear relationship between driving frequency and eective temperature was also uncovered, however this relationship only holds within the experimentally tested frequency range, and deviation from this result is certain at lower driving frequencies.
mgh

Introduction and Theory:

One of the most elementary equations of state for a gas is the so called Ideal gas law. The basic assumptions of the gas law is that the particles do not have any volume of their own(implying neglectable compared to the volume of the system) and that there are no inter-particle forces, and that all collisions are perfectly elastic. These assumptions combined with energy and particle conservation leads to the equation[1] pV = N kT, (1)

with p the gas pressure, V the volume of the gas, N the number of gas particles, k the Stefan-Boltzmann constant, and T the temperature. If the gas is contained within a gravitational eld(such as the atmosphere of the earth) the upper layers exert a pressure on the bottom layers, due to the weight of the air column on top. as such one would expect the pressure to decrease with height. for a small enough column the internal temperature uctuations can be ignored. If the force that a gas column exerts on the gas below it is equated with the weight of the column it can easily be shown that (h) = 0 e
mgh kT

(2)

with (h) the particle density at a height h above some reference point h0 , with a particle density of 0 . g is simply the constant of gravitational acceleration. Equation (2) is called the barometric height equation.

In order to investigate the validity of (2), a mechanical gas consisting out of small( 2 mm in diameter) glass balls were used to simulate an ideal gas. due to large uctuations in the spacial density distribution of the mechanical gas1 , the density was approximated by assuming that for any height h in the gas column, the average density (h) is proportional to the number of particles n(h) passing through a volume element in a xed time, thus: (h) = n(h) (3)

1 400 glass balls were used, instead of the 1024 order generally found in practical gas samples. This causes a high spacial uctuation in density at any given time

Substituting equation (3) into equation (2) leads to: n(h) = n0 e taking the logarithm of (4) implies that ln(n) = ln(n0 ) if the error in n is given by error in ln(n):
n,
mgh kT

(4)

mgh kT

(5)

then the following equation will hold for the

ln(n)

(6) n For an ideal gas, it is thus clear that there is a linear relationship between ln(n) and the height above some reference point h0 . moreover, the gradient of this line, s, satisfy mg . (7) s= kT Clearly then, the temperature of the gas is given by: T = mg ks (8)

The uncertainty in the temperature is given by

T

mg 2 s , ks2
s

(9) the uncertainty in the slope.

with

the uncertainty in the temperature, and

Apparatus:
a pulse counter, PHYWE Digitalzaler 1411, 220V with a photocell. Zenith Varac transformer a Mechanical gas, consisting out of 2 mm diameter glass balls. Grin Xenon Stroboscope B134/8216 240V Electric motor, used to drive a vibrating plate at the bottom of the gas column.

The following apparatus was used in this experiment:

Procedure:

The photocell was connected with the pulse counter, and the gas column was inserted between the detectors of the photocell. The gas column container was adjusted to the maximum possible volume, and the bottom plate was set to vibrate at a frequency of 25 Hz. The frequency was kept constant by illuminating

Figure 1: Apparatus used in this experiment the bottom plate with the light from a stroboscope.2 400 glass balls were placed into the gas column, and the detector was placed at a height of 4 cm above the vibrating plate.3 The amount of glass balls that passed through the detectors eld of view in a 10 s interval was measured and tabulated. this was repeated 3 times, and the average value was calculated. This was done in order to monitor the standard deviation, as the variance between consecutive runs can statistically vary signicantly due to the small particle sample size. This was repeated for heights of up to 16 cm, in 2 cm increments. In order to test the validity of equation (2) for the mechanical gas, the direct consequence thereof was tested (5). The relationship between ln(n) and h was experimentally examined by performing a linear regression. The gradient of the linear regression line was used in (8) to determine the temperature of the system.

Results:

Figures 2 to 5 shows the variation of the spacial particle density of the mechanical gas with respect to the height above the reference point (in this case the vibrating plate). Equation (6) was used to set up the error bars with the stan2 A stroboscope is a device that generate light pulses at a constant known frequency. If the moving plate vibrates at any integer multiple of the frequency of the stroboscope the plate appears to be stationary. As such, the rst time that the plate appears to be stationary in the stroboscope light corresponds to a vibrational frequency of 25 Hz. 3 Practical note: It was observed that the strobe light can eect the count measurements, and as such, in order to minimize the eect of the strobe light, the strobe light was elevated to the same horizontal level as the detector in order to cause a constant light ux for all the datasets. This is a sucient solution to the problem, as the relationship being tested implies that n should vary exponentially as height, h, increases, and thus overcounting would not matter, as long as all the datasets are equally overcounted. Moreover, positioning the detector and the stroboscope on the same level minimizes the physical light ux to the detector anyway.

frequency (Hz) 25 35 45 55

s(cm1 ) 0.86 0.2 0.51 0.03 0.36 0.01 0.26 0.01

T (1019 K) 1.2 0.3 2.1 0.2 2.92 0.08 4.00 0.16

R2 0.9921 0.9957 0.9973 0.9983

Table 1: Regression data for linear curve tting dard deviation in particle number taken as n . A linear regression was applied in order to nd the gradients shown in the gures. Equation (8) was used to nd the temperatures of the mechanical gas. The uncertainty in the slope of each regression line was found by using the curve tting toolbox in MATLAB. The uncertainty was propagated to the error in the temperature of the mechanical gas, using equation (9). The results were summarized in table 1.

The average weight of a glass ball was taken as 0.0148 grams. R2 in table 1 is the correlation coecient value for each dataset.

The temperature of the gas was plotted against the driving frequency of the vibrating plate, and a linear tting was also performed on this dataset. The corresponding plot is displayed in gure 6.

Figure 2: particle density with respect to height at 25 Hz

Figure 3: particle density with respect to height at 35 Hz

Figure 4: particle density with respect to height at 45 Hz

Figure 5: particle density with respect to height at 55 Hz

Figure 6: Linear relationship between driving frequency and eective temperature of the mechanical gas.

Discussion and Conclusion:

The remarkably high linear correlation coecients as can be seen in table 1(the lowest being R2 = 0.9921), shows that the predicted exponential decay in particle density vs. height does indeed hold true. The error in the linear regression model gradually grow as the height increases, due to larger proportional variance to the sample size4 . Future investigations are thus recommended to do more data gathering runs at higher heights in the gas column in order to minimize the variation of the datasets. At 25 Hz driving frequency, a strong linear correspondence(R2 = 0.9921) was observed, and the system temperature was found to be T = 1.2 0.3 1019 K. As the driving frequency was increased to 35 Hz, the temperature was calculated as T = 2.1 0.2 1019 K. Further more, the temperatures at 45 and 55 Hz was found as T = 2.92 0.08 1019 K and T = 4.0 1019 K respectively. Intuitively this makes sense, as one would expect that in order to get macroscopic balls, such as those used in the mechanical gas, to bounce 16 cm into the air by acquiring enough kinetic energy from random heat transfer from the environment instead of a vibrating plate, would indeed require a very hot environment, possibly of the order of 1019 K. There are a few data points where the linear regression line falls outside the allowed error ranges(see gures 2 to 5), giving testament to the fact that this gas in fact does not completely obey the ideal gas law. This variation was also expected, as the mechanical gas consists out macroscopic particles, implying that the neglectable particle volume axiom of the ideal gas is denitely being violated. A linear relationship between driving frequency and eective temperature was uncovered, as seen in gure 6. Little was really tested on this relationship, as there are only 4 data points, which is a very small dataset, and the driving frequencies are all very close to one another,(within a order 2), implying that the observed relationship might simply be a case of linearity observed due to localization5 . A possible succession project might consider working with a far wider eld of frequencies in order to nd the wide spectrum dependence of system temperature on driving frequency. Also, the Ideal gas law can be replaced with the Van der Waals equation that takes the volume of the particles into account.

References:

[1]: K. Laidler et al, Physical Chemistry, Houghton Miin,4th Ed,2003, pp. 14

[2]: P. Atkins; J. de Paula, Physical Chemistry, 2006, Oxford, pp. 12

4 This can be expected, as the error has to propagate via ln(n). for instance, if the variance was 10 counts per 100, then the ln(n) function is stable, as a error of 10 on 100 leads to an small uncertainty of about 0.1 for ln(n), whereas a error of 10 at 30 leads to an error of about 0.4, thus the absolute error is unimportant, it is rather the proportional error that causes uncertainty, and the low particle count at high heights leads to large proportional errors. 5 In fact, on closer inspection of gure 6, it becomes clear that the linear relationship MUST eventually fail, at least in the low energy limit. Clearly, if the driving frequency becomes 0, the classical temperature of the system will be T = 0 K (the particles will all lie at the bottom of the container(This was practically tested)). However, the linear regression model predicts that at 13 Hz, the temperature would have already dropped to T = 0 K