Preview - Kinetic Molecular Theory

A Gas Simulation


Feel free to play around with the simulation, but make sure to refresh your browser before working through the following steps in order to learn how to manipulate the simulation for this lesson. 

  1. Click "Ideal"
  2. Particles Menu
    • Click the green plus sign next to particles
    • To subtract or add 1 particle or 50, click the arrows to the left and right of the number of particles
  3. Reset button
    • Click the white button to the left of the pump to reset the simulation. 
  4. Particle Pump
    • After resetting the simulation, drag the handle of the pump up and down to add a more random number of particles. 
  5. Pause button
    • After adding some particles to the chamber, click the pause button on the lower left side of the screen to pause the simulation.
  6. Play simulation / one frame forward
    • After clicking pause, you'll notice that the pause button turns into a play button. Click the play button to restart the simulation.
    • Pressing pause also lights up the smaller button to the right of the pause button. This smaller button allows particles to shift one frame forward.

Questions

Please answer the questions below.

Click "reset", add one heavy particle. Immediately watch the pressure gauge. What has to happen for the pressure gauge to change from 0.0 atm? 


What is the highest pressure observed when one heavy particle is in the chamber? 


Click "reset", add 50 heavy particles. What is the highest pressure observed?


Use what you learned using the simulation above and your prior knowledge of gas behavior to write a definition for pressure.


Notes

These notes will appear on every page in this lesson so feel free to put anything here you'd like to keep track of.