Can someone explain this statement and give an example:
"A state property is not dependent on the path taken to obtain that state"
State properties
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Re: State properties
I like to think about the difference between position and distance traveled. If you think about a runner on a track, they can do one loop around the track and the distance they have travelled will be a quarter of a mile. However, they are back to the same position that they started in. In this case, distance would be 0.25 miles, but the change in position would be 0. Here, position is a state property because it doesn't matter what path the runner took to get to that position; all that matters is the difference between the initial and final position. Distance travelled, on the other hand, does depend on the path the runner took.
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Re: State properties
A state property does not matter on the path it is taken. It only matters the start and end points so the reaction can go through multiple ups and downs and that will not change anything in a state property.
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Re: State properties
State properties are similar to the analogy of climbing a mountain. When you reach the top of the mountain and started at the same place, it doesn't matter which paths you took or which way you went because ultimately you ended up reaching the same distance once you got to the top of the mountain. In chemistry, the state property takes on this idea because these properties do not take into consideration how you got to your answer beyond the final and initial states. The state property will be the same regardless of the changes in between (ex: how many stops you take on your way to the mountain, which path you took, etc.).
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Re: State properties
If something is a state property, it does not matter the path or the steps it took to get its to its final state. It is kind of like displacement in physics, it's just final minus initial and it does not matter if it took a whole roundabout way to get to the final.
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Re: State properties
The way I like to think about state functions is that they simply just have an initial and a final value, and thus all you care about is the change between those two. I like to think about the physics example of displacement vs. distance traveled, where for example you run a mile in a loop, then your displacement would be zero, but distance traveled would be a mile. So, in that case, you can see two measurements, one which, like a state function, does not care about the path taken (displacement) and one which does (distance traveled).
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Re: State properties
The definition of state properties dictates that you only need the initial and final state in order to figure out the change in that particular value. A real world example is distance versus displacement.. The distance would NOT be a state property since you need to measure the TOTAL space traveled, which would require you to map the entire PATH that the person in the picture traveled. The displacement would be a state property since you don't really need to know the path that the person to get from the start to the end, you just need to know where the start and end are in relation to each other.
Re: State properties
The path doesn't matter when calculating a state property. It is just the starting and end points, no matter the different way's you take to get there the value of a state property will stay the same.
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Re: State properties
A state property does not depend on the path since the initial and the final state are the ones being considered. This is why to find the state property you would subtract the final minus the initial to get the displacement.
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Re: State properties
All the state properties are PVT HUGS(Pressure, Volume, Temperature, Enthalpy. Internal Heat, Gibbs Free Energy, and Entropy). Work(w) and heat(q) aren't state properties.
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