Inert Gases

[Diane Kang 2F]

Why does the presence of an inert gas not effect the equilibrium of a mixture?

When an inert gas is added to a system in equilibrium, total pressure increases. Doesn't this mean the system will tend to work towards minimizing the effect of the increased pressure, by Le Chatelier's Principle?

[Jonathan Pai 2I]

There is no equilibrium change because the concentration of the gases at interest have not changed. Neither the n nor V have changed.

[annabel 2A]

What is an inert gas?

[Edward Xie 2E]

Inert gas is another term for noble gas. Since the noble gases often do not react with many substances, they were referred to as "inert" gases. The noble gases include helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon (group 18 of the periodic table).

[George Ghaly 2L]

Inert gases are excluded from the equilibrium expression because they do not change the equilibrium concentration nor presser of the aqueous or gaseous species.

[armintaheri]

It's not really the change in pressure that affects the equilibrium, it's the change in concentrations. When you decrease the volume, there is less space for molecules to move around in. It gets more crowded. Let's say you have a reaction that has more moles on the reactants side. If you have a lot of reactants, it becomes really crowded in the container and two reactants are more likely to bump into each other and make a product. But when you have a lot of products, it's not as crowded (since there are fewer moles on that side), so the products are not as likely to bump into each other and make reactants. So the equilibrium moves toward the products. But when you increase the pressure by adding a noble gas, the reactants and products don't get any closer together in the container. The space between them just gets filled with inert gas molecules. So even though the pressure has increased, the reactant and product molecules are no more likely to bump into each other than they were before.

[Bruce Chen 2H]

inert gases essentially have no effect on the reaction because it does not affect the concentrations of these gases.

[Dong Hyun Lee 4E]

Inert gases dont react with any of the reactants. However inert gases do change the pressure but since this is not due to volume, the reaction doesnt change.