– I am not wrapping my head around partial pressure – according to wikipedia:
“the notional [pressure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure) of that constituent gas if it alone occupied the entire [volume](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume) of the original mixture at the same [temperature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature)”
does it mean the pressure of the existing quantity of constituent gas if all other gases were removed from the given volume? Not the pressure if you were to fill that space to capacity with the gas?
In: Physics
Say you have a big tub filled with ping pong balls. Half of them are red, a quarter are blue, and a quarter are green. The ping-pong balls are pressing against each other and the sides of the tub. How hard they press against the sides is the pressure.
Now, say you took out all the red and blue balls. How hard are the green balls pressing against the sides of the tub now? The tub takes up the same amount of space as it always did, and there’s the same amount of green balls, but there’s fewer balls overall, so that force is smaller. That’s the partial pressure.
As for “filling the space to capacity”… with gas that doesn’t make any sense. Gasses always expand to fill their container (ignoring gravity or other external forces). You may be thinking as if the gas were an incompressible liquid, which can completely “fill up”. Adding more gas will just increase the pressure, and the “max capacity” of the container is just when the pressure inside gets so high the container isn’t strong enough to hold it anymore and ruptures or explodes.
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