Tobacco smoke is often considered the most harmful and widespread contaminant of indoor air. Scientists have identified over 4,000 different chemical compounds in tobacco smoke of which at least 50 are known carcinogens. Long term exposure to tobacco smoke has been linked to heart disease, cancer, and respiratory illness in young children and retardation of growth and development of fetuses during pregnancy. Consider an enclosed space with a volume of 12 m 12 m 4 m that has 30 persons smoking two cigarettes every hour. One of the gases coming out of a cigarette is formaldehyde and each cigarette may be assumed to emit 1.35 mg of formaldehyde. Conversion of formaldehyde to carbon dioxide can be assumed to be first order and the rate of reaction is 0.40 per hour. Outside/fresh air enters the enclosed space at the rate of 800 m³ per hour. Assume the smoke becomes completely mixed with air and this smoke-mixed air leaves the enclosed space at the same rate that the fresh air enters. a. What is the concentration of formaldehyde in the room air at steady state? b. If the threshold for eye irritation due to formaldehyde is 0.05 ppm (parts per million), what is the minimum flow rate of fresh air that needs to be maintained for the enclosed space? a. At the assumed temperature of 25 °C and pressure of 1 atm for the enclosed space, convert to ppm using the formula ppm = mg/m³ 24.45/M, where M is 30, the molecular weight of formaldehyde.
Ideal and Real Gases
Ideal gases obey conditions of the general gas laws under all states of pressure and temperature. Ideal gases are also named perfect gases. The attributes of ideal gases are as follows,
Gas Laws
Gas laws describe the ways in which volume, temperature, pressure, and other conditions correlate when matter is in a gaseous state. The very first observations about the physical properties of gases was made by Robert Boyle in 1662. Later discoveries were made by Charles, Gay-Lussac, Avogadro, and others. Eventually, these observations were combined to produce the ideal gas law.
Gaseous State
It is well known that matter exists in different forms in our surroundings. There are five known states of matter, such as solids, gases, liquids, plasma and Bose-Einstein condensate. The last two are known newly in the recent days. Thus, the detailed forms of matter studied are solids, gases and liquids. The best example of a substance that is present in different states is water. It is solid ice, gaseous vapor or steam and liquid water depending on the temperature and pressure conditions. This is due to the difference in the intermolecular forces and distances. The occurrence of three different phases is due to the difference in the two major forces, the force which tends to tightly hold molecules i.e., forces of attraction and the disruptive forces obtained from the thermal energy of molecules.
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