Saturday, June 14, 2014

Compression Heating of a Gas

An ideal gas, like air, or helium, will tend to heat up when it is compressed.  Unless measures are taken to cool the gas during the compression process, this can lead to a pretty large temperature increase for relatively modest pressure increases.  If we assume that no cooling takes place (adiabatic) it is easy to calculate the minimum temperature to which the gas is heated from the compression process alone.