Atmospheric composition - gases animation html5 Javascript

Atmospheric Composition - Gases animation

Nitrogen --- Oxygen --- Argon

The animation above reflects the concentration of the most abundant gases in the Earth´s atmosphere, which are: nitrogen 78%, oxygen 21% and argon 0.9% . The remaining 0.1% consists of various gases like carbon dioxide , methane, ozone, nitrous oxides and others.

Because there are a hundred balls bouncing around, there is only one green one representing argon, which is 1 % of the total (to be exact it should be 0.9%).

Anyway, this representation is useful to observe and even to memorize the composition of the atmosphere and also to understand how gases behave, as a set of particles bouncing around, and not as relatively stationary particles as in the case of solids.

However, it is instructive to be aware of the limitations of the model pictured above, like those:

1) All particles in the gas are represented by a single ball, but that is not usually the case. Nitrogen and oxygen are diatomic molecules and should be represented by 2 atoms bound together (it could be 2 of this balls moving together). It is OK for argon which is an atomic gas: because it is noble , it goes around alone...

2) I used colour coding according to the CPK convention, just to distinguish the "molecules". However, it is important to realize that molecules don´t have such property, because they are smaller than the wavelength of light.

3) In reality, the particles are moving at much higher speeds and also there are much more of them.

4) The particles in this animation don´t collide with each other (as they do in real life) but only with the walls of the virtual container. However, this simplification corresponds to the "Perfect gas model".