Gay-Lussac`s Law Britannica

Gay-Lussac`s research, as well as the patronage of Berthollet and the Arcueil group, helped him become a member of the prestigious first class of the Institut national (later the Académie des sciences) early in his career (1806). Although there were no vacancies in the chemistry department, his physics credentials were strong enough to allow him to enter this section. In 1807 he published an important study on heating and cooling by compression and expansion of gases. This was later to be important for the Conservation Act. Three years earlier Gay-Lussac had been appointed junior tutor at the École Polytechnique, where in 1810 he received a professorship in chemistry, which included a considerable salary. After its foundation in 1808, he also obtained a position as professor of physics at the Faculty of Natural Sciences in Paris. The same year, he married Geneviève Rojot; The couple eventually had five children. Although no gas has these properties, the behavior of real gases is described quite accurately by the ideal gas law. A gas does not obey the equation if the conditions are such that the gas or one of the gases composing a mixture is close to its condensation point, the temperature at which it liquefies. Gay-Lussac was the eldest son of a provincial lawyer and royal official who lost his position in the French Revolution of 1789. His father sent him to a boarding school in Paris to prepare him for law school.

At the beginning of his school years, Gay-Lussac became interested in science and his math skills enabled him to pass the entrance exam to the newly founded École Polytechnique, where student expenses were covered by the state. Although the school was primarily designed to train engineers, chemistry was an important part of the curriculum. Gay-Lussac proved to be an exemplary pupil during his studies from 1797 to 1800. After graduation, he entered the prestigious École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées. He retired from this school in 1801 to become research assistant to the chemist Claude-Louis Berthollet. Berthollet, who had recently set up a laboratory in his country home in Arcueil, just outside Paris, has become the center of a small but very influential private scientific society. The first volume of the society`s memoirs, published in 1807, included contributions by Gay-Lussac. From 1816, Gay-Lussac was co-editor of the Annales de chimie et de physique, a post he shared with his former colleague at Arcueil, François Arago. It was an influential position and another source of income. As usual, he continued to hold several teaching positions at the same time; However, his main income in his later years came from a number of government and industry consulting firms. In 1818 he became a member of the state`s gunpowder commission.

Even more lucrative was his appointment in 1829 as director of the analysis department of the Monnaie de Paris, for which he developed a precise and precise method of extracting silver. Gay-Lussac also conducted experiments to determine the alcoholic strength of spirits. In the last years of his life, he worked as a consultant for the Saint-Gobain glass factory. Such a wide range of appointments testifies to the value his contemporaries attached to the application of chemistry to solve social and economic problems. Nevertheless, Gay-Lussac did not escape criticism from his colleagues because he turned away from the path of “pure” science and turned to the path of financial gain. The ideal gas law is a generalization that includes both Boyle`s law and Karl`s law as special cases. This law can be derived from the kinetic theory of gases and is based on the assumptions that (1) gas consists of a large number of molecules that are in random motion and obey Newton`s laws of motion, (2) the volume of the molecules is negligible compared to the volume occupied by the gas, and (3) no force acts on the molecules, except in the case of elastic collisions of negligible duration. are known as the Gay-Lussac law of gas combination. The first part of the law states that when gases combine chemically, this is done in numerically simple volume ratios.

Gay-Lussac illustrated this part of his law with three nitrogen oxides. The compound NO contains equal parts of nitrogen…n As a young man, Gay-Lussac participated in dangerous acts for scientific purposes. In 1804, he and Jean-Baptiste Biot boarded a hydrogen balloon to study the Earth`s magnetic field at high altitude and study the composition of the atmosphere. They reached an altitude of 4,000 meters (about 13,000 feet). In a subsequent solo flight, Gay-Lussac reached 7,016 meters (over 23,000 feet), setting a record for the highest hot air balloon flight that remained uninterrupted for half a century. In 1805-06, in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, Gay-Lussac embarked on a European tour with another of Arcueil`s colleagues, the Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt. for his law of the combination of gas volumes (1808). He had previously (1805) found that hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water in a ratio of 2:1 in a ratio of 2:1. Later experiments with boron trifluoride and ammonia produced spectacularly dense vapors and led him to study similar reactions, such as Boyle`s Law, also known as Mariotte`s Law, a relationship about the compression and expansion of a gas at constant temperature.

This empirical relationship, formulated in 1662 by the physicist Robert Boyle, states that the pressure (p) of a given quantity of gas varies inversely with its volume (v) at constant temperature; that is, as an equation, PV = k, a constant. The relationship was also discovered by the French physicist Edme Mariotte (1676). ideal gas law, also called perfect gas law, relationship between pressure P, volume V and temperature T of a gas at the limit of low pressures and high temperatures, so that the molecules of the gas move almost independently of each other. In such a case, all gases obey an equation of state known as the ideal gas law: PV = nRT, where n is the number of moles of the gas and R is the universal (or perfect) gas constant, 8.31446261815324 joules per Kelvin per mole.