Vapor Pressure - Relation To Boiling Point of Liquids

Relation To Boiling Point of Liquids

Further information: Boiling point

As a general trend, vapor pressures of liquids at ambient temperatures increase with decreasing boiling points. This is illustrated in the vapor pressure chart (see right) that shows graphs of the vapor pressures versus temperatures for a variety of liquids.

For example, at any given temperature, methyl chloride has the highest vapor pressure of any of the liquids in the chart. It also has the lowest normal boiling point (-24.2 °C), which is where the vapor pressure curve of methyl chloride (the blue line) intersects the horizontal pressure line of one atmosphere (atm) of absolute vapor pressure.

Although the relation between vapor pressure and temperature is non-linear, the chart uses a logarithmic vertical axis to produce slightly curved lines, so one chart can graph many liquids. The vapor pressure of a liquid at its boiling point equals the pressure of its surrounding environment.

Read more about this topic:  Vapor Pressure

Famous quotes containing the words relation to, relation, boiling and/or point:

    “Much poetry seems to be aware of its situation in time and of its relation to the metronome, the clock, and the calendar. ... The season or month is there to be felt; the day is there to be seized. Poems beginning “When” are much more numerous than those beginning “Where” of “If.” As the meter is running, the recurrent message tapped out by the passing of measured time is mortality.”
    —William Harmon (b. 1938)

    “Concord is just as idiotic as ever in relation to the spirits and their knockings. Most people here believe in a spiritual world ... in spirits which the very bullfrogs in our meadows would blackball. Their evil genius is seeing how low it can degrade them. The hooting of owls, the croaking of frogs, is celestial wisdom in comparison.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “O but we talked at large before
    The sixteen men were shot,
    But who can talk of give and take,
    What should be and what not
    While those dead men are loitering there
    To stir the boiling pot?”
    —William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

    “Ideals possess the strange quality that if they were completely realized they would turn into nonsense. One could easily follow a commandment such as “Thou shalt not kill” to the point of dying of starvation; and I might establish the formula that for the proper functioning of the mesh of our ideals, as in the case of a strainer, the holes are just as important as the mesh.”
    —Robert Musil (1880–1942)