Charles's Law

Charles's Law

Charles' law (also known as the law of volumes) is an experimental gas law which describes how gases tend to expand when heated.

A modern statement of Charles' law is:

At constant pressure, the volume of a given mass of an ideal gas increases or decreases by the same factor as its temperature on the absolute temperature scale (i.e. the gas expands as the temperature increases).

which can be written as:

where V is the volume of the gas; and T is the absolute temperature. The law can also be usefully expressed as follows:

The equation shows that, as absolute temperature increases, the volume of the gas also increases in proportion.