Charles' Law I

     This is a picture of the setup for the lab we did on Monday. It is somewhat difficult to see from the picture, but the glass syringe is attached to a 25mL flask with the aid of a rubber stopper. The purpose of this experiment was to determine how temperature affects the volume of a trapped gas that is kept at a constant pressure.

     This is of course the raw data that was collected during the experiment. The procedure itself was rather simple. We took a flask of known volume and attached the glass syringe and a release valve to it through a rubber stopper. The volume of the flask was determined by subtracting the mass of the "empty" flask and stopper from the mass of the flask filled with water and stopper. These measurements were taken using an electric balance. Once this was done, we allowed a certain amount of air into the syringe and closed the valve so that the syringe read an equilibrium value of 5cc. We then began the experiment by placing a flask into a beaker of hot water and recorded the final total volume of the trapped air. This procedure was then repeated in cold water and water at room temperature. These values were entered into a spreadsheet and graphed.

     This is a picture of the measurements from the previous picture inserted into a spreadsheet and the graph of Volume vs. Temperature that was constructed using those values. As one can see, the graph of the three data points(the total volume and the temperature measured using a probe) is linear, and the volume of a trapped gas is directly proportional to its temperature. The slope of the line came out to be roughly .106 and its units are cm^3/K.