Single-Component P-V and T-V Diagrams

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System
Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.
The van der Waals equation of state for water is used to generate isotherms on a pressure-log volume () diagram and isobars on a temperature-log volume (
) diagram. Use sliders to change the isotherm temperature on the
diagram and the isobar pressure on the
diagram. Liquid and vapor are in equilibrium within the phase envelope, which is generated from data for water. The isotherms and isobars have three solutions in the two-phase region, but the only physically-meaningful conditions are the orange dots, which correspond to saturated liquid and saturated vapor. The saturated liquid volume
and the saturated vapor volume
are displayed. The horizontal, dashed orange line (at
and
) represents a mixture of liquid and gas. On the
diagram, the green area above the orange line is equal to the area below the orange line when plotted on a linear volume scale.
Contributed by: Rachael L. Baumann (September 2014)
With additional contributions by: John L. Falconer
(University of Colorado Boulder, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
Isotherms and isobars are solved using the Van der Waals equation of state:
,
rearranged:
,
,
,
where is pressure (MPa),
is the ideal gas constant (
),
is temperature (K),
is molar volume (
),
and
are van der Waals constants,
is the critical temperature of water (K), and
is the critical pressure (MPa).
The screencast video at [1] explains how to use this Demonstration.
Reference
[1] Single-Component P-V and T-V Diagrams. www.colorado.edu/learncheme/thermodynamics/SingleComponentPVTVdiagrams.html.
Permanent Citation