Boyle's Law Lab

CHEMISTRY B

Introduction

Boyle's Law explains the relationship between the pressure and volume of an ideal gas when the temperature and amount of gas inside a container remain constant. The purpose of this lab is to investigate the relationship between the volume of a container and pressure of the gas inside the container. You will observe what happens to pressure when volume is changed.

Procedure

1. Open the simulation by clicking on the box labeled "Ideal."
2. Click on the "Width" button. This will cause a measurement to appear below the box.
3. The measurement will be used to estimate the volume of the container. Volume is measured in liters (L). Throughout the activity, use the measurement of the width of the box in nanometers (nm). However, if in the data table, record the unit of measurement as liters (L). For example, if you measure the width of the box as 6.6 nm, you would record a volume of 6.6 L in the data table.
4. Click on the plus sign (+) next to "Particles".
5. Pump approximately 1 atmosphere (atm) of pressure inside the box. (For this simulation, 1 atm is equal to 200 heavy particles.)
6. Click on the Temperature button under "Constant Parameter" at the right-hand side of the screen.
7. What is the temperature inside the box? 300K
8. Adjust the volume of the box by dragging the handle left or right. Allow the temperature to return to its initial value. Move the ruler to measure the size of the box. Record this value in the Heavy gas species table in the volume column. Record the pressure in atmospheres (atm) in the pressure column.
9. Repeat this process, selecting various volumes, until you have four data values.
10. Click the reset button which is a circle in the lower right.
11. Starting with #2 in the procedure above, repeat this experiment using 200 particles in the "Light" species.

Heavy gas species table

Light gas species table

Analyze

1. Using spreadsheet software, create a line of best fit graph of the data of the heavy gas species and a graph of the data of the light gas species. Label the x-axis Volume (L) and the y-axis Pressure (atm). Give the graphs appropriate titles.
2. Based on the data, as the volume gets larger, what happens to the pressure of the gas? Based on the data as the Volume gets larger, the pressure of the gas changes by adding or removing the gas particles, which tends to go lower or higher depending on how many gas particles are added into the different sizes of the boxes.
3. Look up Boyle's Law in a science textbook. How do the results of the experiment support or contradict the results of Boyle's Law? The results of the experiment support Boyle's Law because it describes and shows a pressure / Volume relationship; with any given mass of gas at constant temp, the volume of the gas varies inversely with pressure.
4. Go back to the data tables. Multiply the pressure and volume pairs and show the values of k. Record these values in the data table. Good data may have minor variations, but the values for k should remain relatively consistent. What is the average value of k for the heavy gas species? The average Value of k for the heavy gas Species is 238.14. What is the average value of k for the light gas species? The average Value of k for the light gas species is 234. How does the molecular weight of the gas affect the k value? The molecular weight of the gas affects the K Value as it may increase or decrease based on the molecular weight, but all the data is average value.
5. Based on the results of this lab, develop a hypothesis to explain why bubbles exhaled by scuba divers grow in size as they reach the surface of the ocean. Based on the results of this lab, the bubbles exhaled by scuba divers grow in size as they reach the surface of the ocean because the product of pressure and volume is exactly constant for an ideal gas, but also the pressure of the gas decreases while the volume increases.