Free expansion is an irreversible process in which a gas expands into an insulated evacuated chamber.
Real gases experience a temperature change during free expansion. For an ideal gas, the temperature doesn't change, and the conditions before and after adiabatic free expansion satisfy
- pi Vi = pf Vf,
where p is the pressure, V is the volume, and i and f refer to the initial and final states.
During free expansion, no work is done by the gas. The gas goes through states of no thermodynamic equilibrium before reaching its final state, which implies that one cannot define thermodynamic parameters as values of the gas as a whole. For example, the pressure changes locally from point to point, and the volume occupied by the gas (which is formed of particles) is not a well defined quantity.
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