Ideal Gas Law

The ideal gas law connects how much gas you have, how much space it occupies, how hard it pushes on its container, and how hot it is. It works because, for a dilute gas, the particles are far enough apart that their individual volumes and intermolecular forces are usually negligible, so the gas behavior is dominated by random motion and collisions with the container walls. The constant R sets the scale so that pressure, volume, amount of substance, and temperature are all in compatible units.

Use this law when you need to find one gas property from the other three, especially for gases at moderate pressure and not too close to condensation. It is common in chemistry, physics, engineering, and lab calculations involving sealed containers, reactions that produce gas, or gas sampling.

• Using °C instead of kelvin for temperature
• Mixing units, such as pressure in atm with R in J mol^-1 K^-1 without converting
• Forgetting to rearrange the formula correctly before substituting values