I saw this video that says water “expands into” steam and that 1 cup of water can expand into as much as 1600 cups of steam.
But like… Why specifically 1600? Is steam a gas? If it’s a gas it can basically occupy any volume however large, right? The molecules will just go far apart from each other “forever”, no?
This led to a series of increasingly existential questions….
(1) Is steam not a gas? It does look a little like water when it rises from my kettle.
(2) Do different liquids “expand into” different volumes of their gaseous substances?
And more exestentially…
(3) What does the “volume” of a gas even mean if it can expand basically infinitely to “fill any container” as I was taught in school?
This is the YouTube video here: https://youtu.be/-8lXXg8dWHk
In: 0
1. Steam is a gas
2. Depending on the substance, a certain amount
of liquid would produce a certain amount of vapor based on how much the different molecules like to stick to each other and depending on what pressures you’re working with.
3. The volume of a gas, it’s pressure, and it’s temperature are all interconnected. If you have seen the formula PV = nRT, that’s how they relate. P is the pressure, V is the volume, T is temperature (in Kelvin), n is the number of molecules, and R is the ideal gas constant (related to the boltzmann constant). Basically, if you have something at a certain temperature, and you want to reach a desired pressure, it tells you what volume you need, or you can rearrange it to find any of the variables as long as you fix everything else in place.
Long story short, the steam expands because it’s hot, hot things expand, especially during phase changes. The only common thing that breaks that rule is that ice expands when it freezes.
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