3/5 Boltzmann's Constant and the relationship between Work and Volume

After our pop quiz, we went over it in class and solved the problems again as a group.

We experimented again with the piston to see how it would react to a gradual increase in temperature

We calculated the amount of work the system does by saying that the system does work when the pressure in our system increases. We related this as Work = the integral of Pressure with respect to volume.

We went over the first law of thermodynamics and were asked to express the first law so that a 7 year old child could understand the concept.

We went over the different types of problems related to the change in energy. One was if the system lost energy only to the loss of heat. The other was if the system has lost energy due to a change in potential or kinetic energy.

We had to find alpha by finding the relationship between the change in volume and work done in a system.

We had to find the relationship between volume and pressure and derive an equation that relates Pressure as a function of Volume.

We are introduced to Boltzmann's constant and the root-mean-square velocity and are asked to relate the RMS velocity to the Boltzmann's constant

Here is the experiment we did to make fire by rapidly shrinking the volume in the fire syringe thus rapidly increasing the pressure and temperature inside the syringe.This set the tiny ball of cotton placed on the bottom of the syringe to set it on fire.

This is a video of how molecules behave in a closed environment when there is high or low pressure.

Here is the experiment we did to make fire by doing work on the cotton by quickly shrinking the surrounding volume, thus adding kinetic energy to the small ball of cotton to set it on fire.

This is the calculations of the change in temperature of the ball of cotton inside the tube.

These are the lab questions from the fire syringe lab experiment.

Summary: We learned about the Boltzmann constant and how it was derived and the equation it is used in. We also derived many equations that relate Work to Volume. We learned that if an object expands in volume due to temperature or pressure etc., it will do work based off the amount of volume the object increases by. We also learned first-hand that if volume rapidly decreases, it will force the pressure and temperature to rapidly increase and can lead to combustion like the fire syringe experiment.