Ideal Behavior

[Linh Vo 2J]

In some questions, they state to assume ideal behavior. What does this mean? And will there be times where we have to assume it and the problem won't tell us?

[Jesse Kuehn 1B]

I believe this just means to assume all gases act as ideal gases, for example in equations where there are 5 moles of gas on the reactants side and 5 moles of gas on the product side, all of these gases should behave in the same way. This allows us to predict the way reactions will shift when changes are made to them (adding/subtracting reactants/products) I don't think we will work with anything that is not an ideal gas.

[kateminden]

Thank you for asking this! I was confused about this too. I understood the Ideal Gas Law and how to apply it, but I did not quite understand the concept of "ideal behavior" of gases.

[Brian Hom 2F]

When the problem says assume ideal gas behavior, this means that we can use the constants Cp=5/2R and Cv=3/2R. These constants help in solving a problem where you need to use the formula S=nCln(T2/T1).