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
(for instance if we consider and the two ideal gases to obey equation, PiVi=ciNiRTii=1,2
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
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment