Question

I couldn't decide whether to ask this to Chemistry, Physics or Statistics stack exchange. Hopefully I made the right choice.

According to this Wikipedia page, while the speed of particles in an ideal gas follows a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, the energy distribution in a collection of ideal gas molecules follows a Chi-Square distribution with however many degrees of freedom as the molecule. i.e. 3 for monatomic, 5 for diatomic (at moderate temperatures).

As an example computation to try this out, I wanted to find the activation energy of a reaction which would have 10% of the monatomic gas molecules eligible for reaction at temperature 300 K
.

From the Chi-Square distribution, we should have ERT∼χ23. From the inverse Chi-Square table, at a significance level (i.e. right-tail proportion of the distribution) of 0.1, the critical value is 6.251, which implies that we need EaRT=6.251 so the activation energy should be no more than Ea=8.314×300×6.251=15.5912 kJ mol−1
.

This seems like a reasonable number but then I tried checking the answer by working it out directly from the distribution of energies (also given on the Wikipedia page). I worked out that

P(E>Ea)=2π−−√(RT)3/2∫[infinity]EaE−−√exp(−ERT) dE

Evaluating this numerically for Ea=15591.2 and T=300 gave P(E>Ea)=0.005847, or about 0.5% of the particles, which is very different to the 10% I specified when solving it the first way, showing that something went wrong when I was working it out.

A third method is to use the commonly-cited (but it seems nowhere derived) result from the Arrhenius equation that exp(−EaRT) is the fraction of particles with E>Ea. Using this gives a proportion of 0.00193 = 0.2%, which differs yet again from both previous answers. I am very skeptical of this result though because neither that integral nor the Chi-Square inverse pdf have a nice closed form, and this is a suspiciously clean simple formula to say it's supposed to do the same thing.

Does anyone know the correct way to go about finding particle energy proportions? It would be nice to be able use Chi-Square correctly here as I find it interesting how different areas of science and statistics fit together.

Answer 1

To calculate the activation energy for 10% of monatomic gas molecules to be reactive at 300 K, one should use the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution and the Arrhenius equation, considering the ideal gas constant and the frequency factor.

Step-by-step explanation:

The student is trying to calculate the activation energy (Ea) of a reaction where 10% of monatomic gas molecules are reactive at a temperature of 300 K. The correct way to find the proportion of particles with energy greater than the activation energy involves using the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution and the Arrhenius equation. The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution can provide the fraction of gas molecules that have energies above a certain threshold (Ea). According to the Arrhenius equation, k = Ae-Ea/RT, the fraction of molecules with enough energy to react is given by e-Ea/RT, where R is the ideal gas constant (8.314 J/mol/K), T is the temperature in kelvin, and A is the frequency factor. To find a more accurate answer, one should integrate the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution for energies above Ea and solve for the activation energy that corresponds to the desired fraction of molecules (10%).