In: Physics
If you apply the same amount of heat to 1.00 mol of an ideal moatomic gas, and 1.00 mol of an ideal diatomic gas, which one (if either) will increase more in temperature.? Physicsally, WHY do diatomic gases have a great molar heat capacity that monatomic gases?
The monoatomic gas will have a larger increment in the temperature.
This is due to their higher value of specific heat capacity.
A diatomic gas has more number of degrees of freedom. That is it can vibrate, rotate and translate by accepting energy. While a monoatomic gas only have translation degree of freedom.
When energy is given to a monoatomic gas it uses the energy to increase it's translatory motion or you can say that velocity. Hence the temperature increases. As the temperature of gas is directly depends on the translatory velocity.
When you give energy to the diatomic gas the gas utilize it and distributes the energy in translatory mode , vibratory mode, and rotating mode hence the energy available for translatory mode is less, therefore more energy would be required to increase the temperature.
The TEMPERATURE increment is completely dependent on TRANSLATION MODE.
So monoatomic gas uses complete energy for this purpose while diatomic gas has distribution in different modes. So less energy for translation hence less increment of temperature.
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