1.00kg of helium gas is stored in a container under 200 atm pressure. The gas starts to leak slowly (isothermally at room temperature) through a broken valve until its pressure drops to the atmospheric pressure, 1.00atm . How much is , where is the entropy of the gas in the bottle before it started to leak, and is the entropy of the gas left in the bottle? Give your answer in units of J/K.
Notes: Helium is considered an ideal gas. 1 atm = 101325 Pa. The molecular weight of He is 4.002 g/mol. The ideal gas constant is R=8.314 J/K/mol. Room temperature is 300K.
This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try
refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and,
finally, (c)
loading the
non-javascript version of this page
. We're sorry about the hassle.
Let us consider this process in two steps.
First we expand the gas from its original volume, V i , to a final volume, V f , so that the pressure changes from p i = 2 0 0 a t m to p f = 1 a t m . In an isothermal process p i V 1 = p f V f and therefore V f / V i = 2 0 0 .
The entropy change is Δ S = ∫ i f d Q / T , where d Q is the heat transfer. The total energy of the gas is the same (for ideal gas the energy depends only on the temperature). Therefore the heat transfer must be equal to the work done by the gas, d Q = p d V . According to the ideal gas law p V = n R T , where n = 1 k g / ( 4 . 0 0 2 g / m o l ) = 2 4 9 . 8 7 m o l is the amount of He gas in the container. We get d Q = p d V = V n R T d V and in the integration the temperature T drops out. We get
Δ S = n R ln V i V f = n R ln p f p i ,
This as a general expression for the entropy change of the ideal gas in an isothermal process. With our values we get Δ S = 1 . 1 × 1 0 4 J / K .
In the second part we let most of the gas out to the atmosphere, but keep the original volume. In this process the gas mixing with the atmosphere generates a lot more entropy, but we do not care about that. The gas we keep will have the entropy that corresponds to the volume (or mole) fraction of the total amount of gas:
Δ S b o t t l e = V f V i Δ S = n R p i p f ln p f p i
That comes out to be Δ S b o t t l e = 5 5 . 0 J / K .
Note: Because the pressure of the He gas in the final state is equal to the atmospheric pressure, we are tempted to think that the system reached an equilibrium state. This is far from being true. Once the gas flow stops the diffusion of atoms and molecules keep going on (as long the valve is leaking). In the true equilibrium all the He gas will be in the atmosphere, eventually leaving the Earth, because the thermal velocity is larger than the escape velocity required to break free from the gravity of Earth. The bottle will have only air in it.