This entry contributed by Dana Romero
Portions of this entry contributed by David Rovnyak
In 1787, French physicist Jacques Charles Eric Weisstein's World of Biography observed that the volume of a gas under constant
pressure increases or decreases with temperature. This behavior was quantified around 1808 by another
French scientist, Joseph Gay-Lussac
Charles' law is represented by the formula
where V and are the final and initial volumes and is the change in temperature. More generally, it may be stated that for a gas at constant pressure,
where V is the volume, T is the temperature, and C is a constant.
When combined with the observation by Robert Boyle Eric Weisstein's World of Biography a century earlier that the volume of a gas at a constant temperature is inversely proportional to its pressure (Boyle's law), we arrive at
where T is expressed in degrees Kelvin rather than degrees Celsius and C is a constant. In combination with Avogadro's hypothesis, (3) takes the form
known as the ideal gas law, where R is the universal gas constant and n is the number of moles of the gas in the volume V.
Avogadro's Hypothesis, Boyle's Law, Ideal Gas Law, Universal Gas Constant
