Boyle's Law Problem 1

Level 1

According to Boyle's Law , the pressure of an ideal gas varies inversely with its volume. However, when I blow a balloon, both the pressure and volume increase and lead it to a contradiction. Why would this happen?

Scientists are still trying their best to solve this problem. This is just a special case in Boyle's Law. Boyle made a mistake. The mass of the gas is not fixed.

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2 solutions

Anish Puthuraya
Feb 11, 2014

P 1 V \displaystyle P \propto \frac{1}{V} only when the right hand side of the Ideal Gas Equation is constant.

In other words,
Since P V = n R T \displaystyle PV=nRT , then,

For P 1 V \displaystyle P\propto \frac{1}{V} , we want,

n R T = K \displaystyle nRT = K

Thus,
Assuming the Temp. doesn't change,
n = \displaystyle n = no. of moles = K \displaystyle = K

But, while blowing air into the balloon, we increase the quantity of air inside it, and therefore, n \displaystyle n is not constant, i.e the mass of the gas is not fixed.
This would lead us to think that Boyle's Law is violated.

Well done! By the way, creating this problem needs lots of imagination to figure out the "dummy answer".

Christopher Boo - 7 years, 3 months ago

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Yeah. Good job on it.

Anish Puthuraya - 7 years, 3 months ago

good solution

Daniel Lim - 7 years, 3 months ago
Jeffrey Robles
Feb 14, 2014

Boyle's experiment held two parameters constant: the temperature of the gas and the number of moles of the gas. The scenario above is definitely one in which the number of moles increases significantly. Thus, it is inappropriate to use Boyle's Law here at all.

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