Gas simulation

• 

  A picture of our simulation of an ideal gas.

Inspiration

Everyone is our team is a chemistry student - we wanted to encourage people to learn how temperature impacts the speed of molecules of ideal gas in a sealed container.

What it does

We created a simulation that shows molecules of an ideal gas freely moving - the molecules will bounce off the wall and each other. The speed of the molecules is corresponding to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution and you can change the temperature of the gas to see the increase in speed of the molecules.

How I built it

We used cellular automaton simulation to show the molecules of the ideal gas. We wrote everything in python using matplotlib and numpy to perform operations on the arrays and to see the simulation.

Challenges I ran into

• Fitting the initial velocities to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution was a challenge
• Modelling the interactions of the molecules with the walls and each other
• Animation of the project

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

It actually works!

What I learned

We learned about object oriented programming, planning the structure of the project and writing code collaboratively. we also learned a lot about matplotlib!

What's next for Gas simulation

We want to make it more interactive for a user - so they can not only modulate the temperature but also volume and pressure of the system. This would allow for greater understanding of the ideal gas law and potentially increase the interest in science in general! We could calculate the change in Gibbs Free Energy and entropy to observe our system better. We can expand our simulation to non-ideal gases, but this would make the system much more complex.

Built With

• matplotlib
• numpy
• python