We practiced the ideal gas model today by whiteboarding a few problems that were more difficult than they first appeared. We had to take a little detour over to air pressure and how it is everywhere. It's always fun to play with suction cups. We practiced drawing pressure-volume graphs to describe what's happening to the gas, and started drawing energy bar charts (LOL diagrams) for ideal gases.
It turns out there's only two ways to put energy into a gas: compression and heating the gas. And there's only two ways to take energy out of a gas: expansion and heating the environment. The energy of the gas, for our monatomic ideal gas model, is only translational kinetic energy, so we only need bars in the L's of the LOL for kinetic energy. Now it's time to classify all the different changes a gas can undergo.