The van der Waals equation of state for water is used to generate isotherms on a pressure-log volume (\(P-V\)) diagram and isobars on a temperature-log volume (\(T-V\)) diagram. Use sliders to change the isotherm temperature on the \(P-V\) diagram and the isobar pressure on the \(T-V\) diagram. Liquid and vapor are in equilibrium within the phase envelope, which is generated from data for water.
The isotherms and isobars have three solutions in the two-phase region, but the only physically-meaningful conditions are the orange dots, which correspond to saturated liquid and saturated vapor. The saturated liquid volume \(V^L\) and the saturated vapor volume \(V^V\) are displayed. The horizontal, dashed orange line (\(P^{sat}\) and \(T^{sat}\)) represents a mixture of liquid and gas. On the \(P-V\) diagram, the green area above the orange line is equal to the area below the orange line when plotted on a linear volume scale.
This simulation was created in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, at University of Colorado Boulder for LearnChemE.com by Rachael Baumann under the direction of Professor John L. Falconer and was converted to HTML5 by Patrick Doyle, with additional contributions by Neil Hendren. Address any questions or comments to learncheme@gmail.com. All of our simulations are open source, and are available on our LearnChemE Github repository.
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