Name: Ch'ng Yit Seong
Number Matric: 20102040442
Topic: Matter

Saturday 26 November 2011

The Changing State

Evaporation
Sometimes a liquid can be sitting in one place (maybe a puddle) and its molecules will become a gas. That's the process called evaporation. It can happen when liquids are cold or when they are warm. It happens more often with warmer liquids. Evaporation is all about the energy in individual molecules, not about the average energy of a system. The average energy can be low and the evaporation still continues.

You might be wondering how that can happen when the temperature is low. It turns out that all liquids can evaporate at room temperature and normal air pressure. Evaporation happens when atoms or molecules escape from the liquid and turn into a vapor. Not all of the molecules in a liquid actually have the same energy.

The energy you can measure with a thermometer is really an average of all the molecules in the system. There are always a few molecules with a lot of energy and some with barely any energy at all. The molecules with a lot of energy are able to build up enough power to become a gas. Once they reach that energy level, they can leave the liquid. When the molecule leaves, it has evaporated.

The rate of evaporation can also increase with a decrease in the gas pressure around a liquid. Molecules like to move from areas of higher pressure to lower pressure. The molecules are basically sucked into the surrounding area to even out the pressure. Once the vapor pressure of the area increases to a specific level, the rate of evaporation will slow down.



Freezing

Freezing or solidification is a phase change in which a liquid turns into a solid when its temperature is lowered below its freezing point. The reverse process is melting.

All known liquids, except liquid helium, freeze when the temperature is lowered enough. Liquid helium remains liquid at atmospheric pressure even at absolute zero, and can be solidified only under pressure. For most substances, the melting and freezing points are the same temperature; however, certain substances possess differing solid–liquid transition temperatures. For example, agar displays a hysteresis in its melting and freezing temperatures. It melts at 85 °C (185 °F) and solidifies from 31 °C to 40 °C (89.6 °F to 104 °F).



Sublimation
Sublimation is the process of transition of a substance from the solid phase to the gas phase without passing through an intermediate liquid phase (can also occur in opposite order, such as in Hoar frost). Sublimation is an endothermic phase transition that occurs at temperatures and pressures below a substance's triple point in its phase diagram.

At normal pressures, most chemical compounds and elements possess three different states at different temperatures. In these cases, the transition from the solid to the gaseous state requires an intermediate liquid state. Note, however, that the pressure referred to here is the partial pressure of the substance, not the total (e.g., atmospheric) pressure of the entire system. So, all solids that possess an appreciable vapor pressure at a certain temperature usually can sublime in air (e.g., ice just below 0°C). For some substances, such as carbon and arsenic, sublimation is much easier than evaporation from the melt, because the pressure of their triple point is very high, and it is difficult to obtain them as liquids.

Sublimation requires additional energy and is an endothermic change. The enthalpy of sublimation (also called heat of sublimation) can be calculated as the enthalpy of fusion plus the enthalpy of vaporization. The reverse process of sublimation is deposition. The formation of frost is an example of meteorological deposition.


Melting
Melting, or fusion, is a physical process that results in the phase change of a substance from a solid to a liquid. The internal energy of a substance is increased, typically by the application of heat or pressure, resulting in a rise of its temperature to the melting point, at which the rigid ordering of molecular entities in the solid breaks down to a less-ordered state and the solid liquefies. An object that has melted completely is molten. Substances in the molten state generally have reduced viscosity with elevated temperature; an exception to this maxim is the element sulfur, whose viscosity increases with higher temperatures in its molten state.
Some organic compounds melt through mesophases, states of partial order between solid and liquid.



Condensation
Condensation is the change of the physical state of matter from gaseous phase into liquid phase, and is the reverse of vaporization. When the transition happens from the gaseous phase into the solid phase directly, the change is called deposition.
Condensation is initiated by the formation of atomic/molecular clusters of that species within its gaseous volume—like rain drop or snow-flake formation within clouds—or at the contact between such gaseous phase and a (solvent) liquid or solid surface.
A few distinct reversibility scenarios emerge here with respect to the nature of the surface.
  • absorption into the surface of a liquid (either of the same species or one of its solvents)—is reversible as evaporation.

  • adsorption (as dew droplets) onto solid surface at pressures and temperatures higher than the specie's triple point—also reversible as evaporation.

  • adsorption onto solid surface (as supplemental layers of solid) at pressures and temperatures lower than the specie's triple point—is reversible as sublimation.

Condensation commonly occurs when a vapour is cooled and/or compressed to its saturation limit when the molecular density in the gas phase reaches its maximal threshold. Vapour cooling and compressing equipment that collects condensed liquids is called "condenser".

Psychrometry measures the rates of condensation from and evaporation into the air moisture at various atmospheric pressures and temperatures. Water is the product of its vapour condensation—condensation is the process of such phase conversion.

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