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Introduction
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The ideal gas law is the equation of the state of a gas. It combines four empirical gas laws discovered by Boyle, Charles, Gay-Lussac anintro.cmld Avogadro a few hundred years ago. The ideal gas law has a very simple form: PV=nRT, where P is the pressure, V is the volume, n is the amount of gas, R is the universal gas constant, and T stands for the temperature. The gas law is more or less accurate in the case of low pressure and/or high temperature. It becomes increasingly inaccurate at higher pressure and lower temperature. It is often used in science and engineering to obtain a simple, but very rough, solution for modeling the behaviors of gases.
The gas law can be derived using statistical mechanics by assuming that a gas is composed of a large number of non-interacting molecules. However, the scientists discovered them from observations of real gases which are composed of interacting molecules. Can we derive the gas laws from simulations of interacting particles? We will find out in this activity.
Before we start, let us first introduce our piston to be used in the virtual experiments. Our piston is a rectangular object that can be equipped with pressure gauges on its four surfaces (usually not more than two are used). External forces can be applied to it in both horizontal and vertical direction to create the external pressure. If a piston is not fixed, it will stop moving significantly only when the external pressure balances the internal pressure, which results from the collisions of molecules with the piston and is measurable by a pressure gauge stuck to that surface. Note that the piston can not only be used to compress the gas but also decompress the gas.
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