Question
Question: How was the Avogadro’s law discovered\(?\)...
How was the Avogadro’s law discovered?
Solution
Avogadro's law is an experimental gas law discovered by Amedeo Avogadro in 1811 relating the volume of a gas to the amount of substance of gas present and is a specific case of the ideal gas law. The law relate to the work of two of his contemporaries, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and John Dalton.
Complete step-by-step answer: Avogadro's law is an experimental gas law discovered by Amedeo Avogadro in 1811 relating the volume of a gas to the amount of substance of gas present and is a specific case of the ideal gas law.
Gay-Lussac noticed that when 2L of H2 gas react with 1L of O2 gas, they form 2L of gaseous H2O. He observed all gases seemed to react in simple volume ratios.
In 1811 Avogadro published a paper in Journal de Physique, the French Journal of Physics, where he gave the explanation to Gay-Lussac’s observations of gas reactions and said that equal volumes of all gases at the same temperature and pressure contain equal numbers of molecules provided they follow ideal gas behaviour and this law is now called Avogadro’s law. In practice, real gases show small deviations from the ideal behaviour and the law holds only approximately, but is still a useful approximation
In Avogadro’s view, the reason that 2L of H2 gas react with 1L of O2 gas, they form 2L of gaseous H2O is that the volume decreases because the number of particles present decreases. Therefore the chemical reaction must be: 2H2(g)+O2(g)→2H2O(g).
Note: According to Avogadro’s law we can write that Vis directly proportional to n which can be represented as: V=nk, where Vis the volume of a given gas, nis the amount of substance of the has in moles and k is a constant for a given temperature and pressure.