Home > Community > Can we consider nitric oxide production in Ostwalds process to be adiabatic?
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+ Thermodynamics
+ Nitrous oxide
+ Chemistry
+ Nitric oxide
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Madu Franklin

Can we consider nitric oxide production in Ostwalds process to be adiabatic?

Dalton Mendeleve  Follow

Imagine you are standing on the floor of a room and there is a perfectly elastic friction free ball bouncing from the floor to the ceiling and back to the floor over and over at a speed of 10 meters per second. Now the floor starts moving towards the ceiling at one meter per second. From the viewpoint of the observer standing on the floor, the traveling at 10 m/s going to look like 11 m/s because that’s the sum of the ball’s and floor’s speed. The ball bounces off the floor at the same speed it hit it, which is 11 m/s from the moving floor’s vantage point and 12 m/s from the stationary ceiling’s vantage point. It returns to the floor after bouncing off the ceiling at 12 m/s from the ceiling’s vantage point which is 13 m/s from the moving floors vantage point and leaves the floor at 13 m/s from the floor’s vantage point which is 14 m/s from the ceiling’s vantage point.

Take a Superball® and bounce it on a hard concrete floor, and while it’s bouncing, take a heavy plank and push it downwards on the bouncing ball and listen to it speed up with every bounce. Surely, I’m not the only person who’s ever done this. This is also what happens to air molecules as they bounce off the walls of a contracting container.

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Dipesh Nepal  Follow

A brief skim of the process tells me that the nitrogen oxide formation in the process of making nitric acid is exothermic, and that excess heat is vented out of the system. So no, not adiabatic.

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