Measuring Vapor Pressure of Water

Purpose: The purpose of this lab is to find the vapor pressure of water between temperatures of 50oC and 80oC. Procedure: In order to determine the vapor pressure of water, we will first heat water within a beaker, and place a cylinder with a set volume of air within the beaker. At around 80oC, we will measure the volume of the air within the cylinder, and as the water within the beaker cools, we will measure the changing volume of the air as well. We can determine the pressure within the cylinder with the formula . With the pressure in the cylinder, we can also calculate the number of moles of air trapped within the cylinder with the formula nair = Pair = . From this, the partial pressure of the air in the cylinder can be calculated by , and we can finally calculate the vapor pressure of water through the formula Pwater

= Pcylinder - Pair. Data:

Temperature (oC) 70 65 60 55 50 Volume (mL) 10.0 9.0 8.4 7.8 7.5 Corrected Volume (mL) 9.8 8.8 8.2 7.6 7.3 Pressure of air (atm) 0.787 0.864 0.943 0.970 0.995 Pressure of water (atm) 0.208 0.131 0.082 0.025 0.000

Calculations and Graphs:

Discussion of Theory: In this lab we attempted to find the vapor pressure of water in relation to different temperatures. To find out the pressure at each temperature, we used a series of equations to calculate the final pressure. We used all these equations to calculate the vapor pressure of water for a range of 50C - 70C and determined that as temperature of the water increased, the vapor pressure increased as well. We can see that as the temperature increased, it promoted molecular movement and pressure exerted by water. The Kinetic Molecular Theory states that gas particles are in constant motion, these particles exert negligible forces on each other, there is no force of attraction between the particles and the walls of the container, and the collisions between the particles and

the wall are perfectly elastic. Based on these statements, we see that by the Kinetic Molecular Theory, it becomes plausible that faster-moving molecules lead to more forceful collisions on the container, which increases pressure exerted from the water. As the pressure in the room was held constant, since the vapor pressure of water went up, the vapor pressure of the air went down so that equilibrium would be maintained. Conclusion: Through our experiment, we were able to calculate the enthalpy of vaporization for water: 1.264 kJ/mol. However, the actual enthalpy of vaporization is 40.7 kJ/mol, a significant departure from our conclusion. Sources of this error can be traced back to measurements and calculations of water vapor pressure where inaccuracies in measuring the h value could have made each calculation increasingly inaccurate, as we would miscalculate the vapor pressure of water, thus changing the natural log of that vapor pressure when calculating the enthalpy of vaporization. This procedure could have been improved by comparing values every few steps of so with other references in order to determine whether or not our calculations were relatively accurate, as it is easier to fix problems in this stage instead of checking multiple problems to find the origin of the error. Error Analysis: Some errors in the calculation were made due to assumptions for certain values that may impact the final enthalpy of vaporization, such as letting h be a constant instead of varying it as the temperature varied. We were also unable to completely cool the water down to a temperature of 0oC, which may have resulted in slight errors with our calculations. Additionally, the volume of the water changed through the course of the experiment - when the beaker was cooling, ice cubes were added in order to decrease the temperature at faster rates. Furthermore, the water used was not purely distilled, as it was handled by human hands. In addition to this, because the substance used in the experiment was tap water, it contained traces of calcium and other added elements, which may have lowered the measured partial pressure of the water slightly. Percent Error:
v p ou v p v p

96.894% error

Questions:
1 Vapor pressure is the pressure exerted by the vapor of a liquid when the liquid and vapor states are in dynamic equilibrium, which is when vaporization and condensation are taking place at the same rates. Vapor pressure is related to temperature as when the temperature of a liquid increases, molecules move more energetically and a greater fraction of molecules can escape into the air from the liquid, so the vapor pressure would increase because the dynamic equilibrium will increase to a higher level as well. 2 The enthalpy of vaporization is the energy necessary to vaporize one mole of a certain liquid relative to its boiling point. 3 The vapor pressure of water near zero degrees Celsius is around 4.58 mm Hg instead of 0 mm Hg. This value is insignificant compared to the values we received for the vapor pressure at around 50oC to 80oC, as the values that we received were around three digit numbers, giving an error from our assumption of only around 1%. Therefore, our assumption still gives relatively valid data. 4 Water pressure changes according to depth, so the gas measurement could change just by moving the cylinder. Therefore, the h value should have been measured at each temperature, instead of assuming that h remained constant throughout all the me su ements, but this ssumption didnt impact our results in a major way as the water pressure changes at such small values of depth are negligible. 5 Our values were relatively close to a straight line, with the correlation constant r being very close to one, so our data was precise without much error as it follows the linear line predicted by using the actual equation closely. 6 The Clausius-Clapeyron equation is given by:

The method of analysis using graphical representation and fitting an equation gives a better value of the enthalpy of vaporization because it utilizes more than one data point in order to find the enthalpy of vaporization of water. Error is more significant given less data points, but with more data points, the error begins to cancel out and become less significant. Since the ClausiusClapeyron equation requires only two data points, there is a lot more room for error than using several data points in a graphical method of analysis.