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Johannes Diderik Van der Waals Biography

Johannes Diderik Van der Waals

(Leiden, Netherlands, 1837-Amsterdam, 1923) Dutch physicist.Professor at the universities of The Hague (1877) and Amsterdam (1908), he is known for the equation of the state of real gases (Van der Waals equation) that allows a closer approximation to physical reality than the ideal gas equation , by taking into account the existing interaction forces between the molecules; This contribution led to the award, in 1910, of the Nobel Prize in Physics.He also developed research on electrolytic dissociation, on the thermodynamic theory of capillarity and on fluid statics.He also studied the electrostatic attractive forces (Van der Waals forces) exerted between the constituent molecules of matter, which have their origin in the distribution of positive and negative charges in the molecule.

JD Van der Waals

Among the contributions of Van der Waals stands out the aforementioned refinement of the laws (discovered by Robert Boyle and Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac) that relate the volume, pressure and temperature of ideal gases.Real gases do not meet the Boyle-Mariotte and Charles-Gay-Lussac laws with complete accuracy; the deviation from the ideal behavior depends on the pressure, the temperature and the gas in question.At ordinary temperatures, when the pressure drops, real gases are more compressible than they should be according to the Boyle-Mariotte law, until they reach a certain pressure at which they begin to compress less than an ideal gas would..

In 1873 Van der Waals argued that, given the change of sign in the deviation of the real behavior from the ideal, this deviation had to be due to two opposite causes.The first is the existence of attractive forces between the molecules, which make the observed pressure (measured from the collisions of the gas molecules against the wall of the container) is less than the pressure that the gas actually has.Van der Waals reasoned that the deviation must be inversely proportional to the square of the number of molecules per unit volume.

The second is that the molecules are not material points, but occupy a volume, so the volume that the molecules actually have is less than the total volume occupied by the gas; this correction had already been introduced by Rudolf Clausius.In accordance with the correction terms entered, Van der Waals formulated the equation that bears his name, which better fits the actual behavior of gases than that of ideal gases, although it is not rigorously exact either, since the two constants that he introduced in the formulation vary somewhat depending on the pressure and temperature.

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