 Hi, my name is Charwell and I am a third year chemistry student at the Australian National University. When I'm not studying, I play the piano and like to explore nature. I will be introducing you to Ideal Gas Awards. So, what is an ideal gas? An ideal gas is a simple model of a real gas that makes it easy to predict what will happen in any scenario. This simulation has been created using the gas model. You can try that yourself. Most real gases, such as the oxygen we breathe in and helium in balloons, can be modelled by randomly moving point particles. This allows us to quantify properties such as pressure, temperature, volume and number of moles. Once we can put a number to these properties, we can calculate and predict how they will behave. In an ideal gas, we make the assumptions that gas molecules are indistinguishable, small, hard spheres. All collisions that is either between two particles or between a particle and a wall of a container are elastic. There is no energy lost from collisions or friction. Average distance between the particles is much larger than the size of the particles. The particles move in random directions with a distribution of speeds. There are no attractive or repulsive forces, such as van der Waals or electrostatic interaction between the particles, apart from the point-like collisions between them. This simulation is created using a more complex model of how real gases behave. You can try it out yourself too. In this example, where there is a relatively low density of particles, you can see they are behaving like an ideal gas. They bounce around in random directions with a distribution of speeds, and there isn't much energy lost to collisions. Just like the ideal gas model predicts. If I have more particles in the same size box, however, they actually tend to clump together. This means the ideal gas model is quite accurate for gases with low density at higher temperatures, but it becomes less useful for gases with high density at lower temperatures. Models in science are very useful, but it's important to remember that they are only models and to know their limitations. In the following videos, we will be introducing the common gas laws. When we use any of these laws, we are making the assumption that the gases we are dealing with are behaving like ideal gases.