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
Steam is water in gas form. Like other gases, you can compress it in a container (the number they are giving you is “at standard pressure”, meaning at the average air pressure at sea-level — 14.696 psi).
You can imagine that if you turned 1 cup of water into 1600 cups of steam crammed into a 1 cup container, the pressure would be 1600x surrounding air pressure (and the container would need to be super strong, otherwise it would just explode). For reference, the propane tank for a gas grill will explode at 42x. The strongest gas cylinders you can buy go up to 680x.
Most liquids can be heated into gases (and the gas takes up more space at standard pressure). Conversely, you can cool and compress gasses into liquids (liquid nitrogen, oxygen, etc).
Latest Answers