Saturday, 23 June 2018

Mixing of Ideal gas - Thermodynamic equilibrium


I always get confused what exactly happens when two ideal gases mix.


Consider the initial situation where two gases are in a box, separated by a rigid and adiabatic wall between them. Now when the wall between them is removed, they come to equilibrium (of course assuming the process is done quasi-statically). Initially the thermodynamic quantities of the gas be


Ui,Si,Ti,Pi,Vii=1,2

Now after the wall is removed, the condition for equilibrium is attained by the condition dS=0
I am not able to apply this and find out exactly the final values of the thermodynamic quantities for an arbitrary ideal gas situation (I am not particularly able convince the situation physicaly)


(for instance if we consider and the two ideal gases to obey equation, PiVi=ciNiRTii=1,2

where ci is the degrees of freedom of the gas, like ci=32,52 for monatomic and diatomic respectively.



Answer



The total initial internal energy is U=U1+U2=ν12c1RT1+ν22c2RT2 where the last equality comes from Joules' first law for ideal gases and where ci is the number of moles of species i and νi is the number of degrees of freedom of the molecule (3 for atoms, 5 for diatomic molecules etc..).


Now, once equilibrium is reached everybody should have the same temperature T. Since you are dealing with an ideal gas it implies that:


U=(ν1c1+ν2c2)RT2

and hence since the whole system is isolated


T=ν1c1T1+ν2c2T2ν1c1+ν2c2



Once the temperature is known, the rest follows easily. The pressure can be gotten straightforwardly as


P=(c1+c2)RTV1+V2


because the ideal gas law is independent of the number of degrees of freedom of the different species.


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