Henry's law was named after its discoverer, the chemist-physician William Henry (1774–1836). This law, in addition to fugacity (q.ν.) and Raoult's law (which states that the actual vapor pressure of a solvent is proportional to its mole fraction and vapor pressure when it is pure), aids in the description of solute and solvent behavior under non-ideal conditions such as dilute solutions, as well as the solubility of gases in water.
Henry's law states that at constant temperature the solubility of a gas in a liquid is proportional to the partial pressure of the gas in contact (equilibrium) with the liquid, with equilibria of the following type:
and is mathematically expressed by the following equation:
where [A(aq)] is the aqueous concentration of the gas, P x is the partial pressure of the gas, and kis Henry's law constant in units of mol/L/atm. For solutes in dilute solutions where the solute holds a finite concentrations, the following equation will be an approximation of...
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Bibliography
Krauskopf, K.B. and Bird, D.K. (1995) Introduction to Geochemistry, 3rd edn. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 647 pp.
Smith, B.S. (1990) Basic Chemical Thermodynamics, 4th edn. New York: Oxford University Press, 166 pp.
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Campbell, I.T., Brand, U. (1998). Henry's law . In: Geochemistry. Encyclopedia of Earth Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-4496-8_155
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