Inert Gases and Le Chatelier's Principle

[Arezo Ahmadi 3J]

If you had a reaction with an inert gas in it, and you increase the partial pressure of that inert gas, does that affect the equilibrium at all? Like if the inert gas was a reactant, would the equilibrium shift to the products or would there be no change?

[Chanel Mao 3D]

Hi!
If the reaction is at constant volume, then the addition of an inert gas would not change the equilibrium because it won't change the partial pressures of any of the other gases. Hope this helps!

[Muskaan Abdul-Sattar]

The addition of an inert gas would actually not affect the equilibrium! It doesn't affect the pressure of other gases so long as the volume remains unchanged. Changing the volume would increase/decrease pressure, but simply the addition of the inert gas would have zero effect.

[Bella Bursulaya 3G]

Nope! The addition of an inert gas might slow down the reaction of equilibrium (i.e equilibrium will take longer to achieve because of competing collision) but it will not change equilibrium because the concentrations of the gases that are reacting do not change. Inert gases hardly ever react, so they're kind of just there and aren't reactants, so they can't change the pressure even if they wanted to.

[SashaAnand2J]

As long as the volume of the chamber isn't changed, the inert gas does not change partial pressures involved in the reaction! By definition, inert gases do not react, so their presence does not impact equilibrium in any way (essentially the premise that they would even be a reactant is incorrect). Remember, only temperature changes impact equilibrium constants!

[AndrewNguyen_2H]

The definition of an inert gas means that it chemically unreactive to the reaction at hand. Typically, if you add pressure through an inert gas, the volume does not change so the reaction will not shift. You have stated that the inert gas could be part of the reactants, but at that point it would cease to be an inert gas and the reaction would shift to the right.

[Lauren Sarigumba 1K]

Inert gases do not change the equilibrium constant because they do not react with other substances. Therefore, the partial pressures of the reactants and the products do not change and thus the equilibrium constant does not change.