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Please be sure you are familiar with the topics discussed in Essential Skills 6 (Section 11.9 "Essential Skills 6") before proceeding to the Application Problems. Problems marked with a ♦ involve multiple concepts.
During cold periods, workers in the citrus industry often spray water on orange trees to prevent them from being damaged, even though ice forms on the fruit.
♦ Relative humidity is the ratio of the actual partial pressure of water in the air to the vapor pressure of water at that temperature (i.e., if the air was completely saturated with water vapor), multiplied by 100 to give a percentage. On a summer day in the Chesapeake, when the temperature was recorded as 35°C, the partial pressure of water was reported to be 33.9 mmHg.
The following table gives the vapor pressure of water at various temperatures. Calculate the relative humidity.
T (°C) | 0 | 10 | 30 | 50 | 60 | 80 | 100 |
P (mmHg) | 4.6 | 9.2 | 31.8 | 92.6 | 150 | 355 | 760 |
♦ Liquids are frequently classified according to their physical properties, such as surface tension, vapor pressure, and boiling point. Such classifications are useful when substitutes are needed for a liquid that might not be available.
♦ In the process of freeze drying, which is used as a preservation method and to aid in the shipping or storage of fruit and biological samples, a sample is cooled and then placed in a compartment in which a very low pressure is maintained, ≈0.01 atm.
♦ Many industrial processes for preparing compounds use “continuous-flow reactors,” which are chemical reaction vessels in which the reactants are mixed and allowed to react as they flow along a tube. The products are removed at a certain distance from the starting point, when the reaction is nearly complete. The key operating parameters in a continuous-flow reactor are temperature, reactor volume, and reactant flow rate. As an industrial chemist, you think you have successfully modified a particular process to produce a higher product yield by substituting one reactant for another. The viscosity of the new reactant is, however, greater than that of the initial reactant.