18/5/2015 Relative Humidity
Relative Humidity
The amount of water vapor in the air at any given time is usually less than
that required to saturate the air. The relative humidity is the percent of
saturation humidity, generally calculated in relation to saturated vapor
density.
Index
Kinetic
The most common units for vapor density are gm/m3. For example, if the theory
actual vapor density is 10 g/m3 at 20°C compared to the saturation vapor concepts
density at that temperature of 17.3 g/m3 , then the relative humidity is
Applications
Calculation of kinetic
theory
Vapor
application
Relative humidity is the amount of concepts
Careful! There are moisture in the air compared to what the air
dangers and possible can "hold" at that temperature. When the
misconceptions in these air can't "hold" all the moisture, then it
common statements condenses as dew.
about relative humidity.
What's the problem?
Saturation vapor pressure Dewpoint Relative humidity calculation
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Dewpoint
If the air is gradually cooled while maintaining the moisture content constant,
the relative humidity will rise until it reaches 100%. This temperature, at which
Index
the moisture content in the air will saturate the air, is called the dew point . If
the air is cooled further, some of the moisture will condense.
Kinetic
theory
concepts
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of kinetic
theory
Vapor
application
concepts
Relative humidity Saturation vapor pressure Calculation of dewpoint
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Empirical fit of saturated vapor
density versus Celsius
Temperature
Index
It is possible to produce what appears to be a good fit of the saturated
vapor density of water all the way up to the boiling point. But for the Kinetic
purposes of calculating relative humidity, the values near boiling are not theory
important and are given too much emphasis in the empirical fit above. The concepts
behavior of water vapor density is a non-linear function, but an
approximate calculation of saturated vapor density can be made from an Applications
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empirical fit of the vapor density curve of kinetic
theory
Vapor
application
concepts
If only the values up to 40°C are used for the fit, a more precise fit of the
data is obtained in the temperature region where relative humidity is of
interest. This is the fit used in the calculation of relative humidity below,
but it significantly underestimates the vapor density near the boiling point.
The saturated vapor pressure reaches 760 mmHg at 100°C, the standard
boiling point. The saturated vapor pressure roughly parallels the saturated
vapor density; numerical values are included in the vapor density table.
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Relative Humidity Calculation
For an air temperature of 63 C= 145.4 F, the
gm/m3 (Calculated by
saturated vapor density is 135.98748851
an empirical fit to published data.) If the actual humidity in Index
the air is 20 gm/m3, then the relative humidity is
%. With this amount of humidity, the dewpoint is
14.707235363442482
approximately 22.6 °C = 72.68 °F. Kinetic
theory
concepts
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Caution! The empirical fit used is only reliable up to 40°C.
It seriously underestimates saturated vapor density near Applications
of kinetic
100°C. theory
The above calculation can be used to demonstrate a perennial winter Vapor
problem in colder climates. Heating your house tends to make the air application
excessively dry. Your degree of comfort depends upon the relative concepts
humidity. Pick a cold outside temperature and adjust the actual humidity
so that the relative humidity is about 60%. Then presume you take that air
into your house and heat it to 20°C without changing the actual humidity.
What will that do to the relative humidity?
Empirical fit of density data Relative humidity
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How much moisture can the air
"hold"?
Careful! There are Relative humidity is the amount of
dangers and possible moisture in the air compared to what the air
misconceptions in these can "hold" at that temperature. When the
common statements air can't "hold" all the moisture, then it
about relative humidity. condenses as dew.
Of all the statements about relative humidity that I have heard in everyday
conversation, the above is probably the most common. It may represent
understanding of the phenomenon, and has some common sense utility,
but it may represent a complete misunderstanding of what is going on
physically. The air doesn't "hold" water vapor in the sense of having some
attractive force or capturing influence. Water molecules are actually
lighter and higher speed than the nitrogen and oxygen molecules that
make up the bulk of the air, and they certainly don't stick to them and are
not in any sense held by them. If you examine the thermal energy of
molecules in the air at a room temperature of 20°C, you find that the
average speed of a water molecule in the air is over 600 m/s or over 1400
miles/hr! You are not going to "hold" that molecule!
Another possibly helpful perspective would be to consider the space
between air molecules under normal atmospheric conditions. From
knowledge of atomic masses and gas densities and the modeling of the
mean free path of gas molecules, we can conclude that the separation
between air molecules at atmospheric pressure and 20°C is about 10 times
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their diameter. They will typically travel on the order of 30 times that
separation between collisions. So water molecules in the air have a lot of
room to move about and are not "held" by the air molecules.
Index
When one says that the air can "hold" a certain amount of water vapor, the
fact that is being addressed is that a certain amount of water vapor can be
resident in the air as a constituent of the air. The high speed water
molecules act, to a good approximation, as particles of an ideal gas. At an Kinetic
atmospheric pressure of 760 mm Hg, you can express the amount of water theory
in the air in terms of a partial pressure in mm Hg which represents the concepts
vapor pressure contributed by the water molecules. For example at 20°C,
the saturation vapor pressure for water vapor is 17.54 mm Hg, so if the air Applications
is saturated with water vapor, the dominant atmospheric constituents of kinetic
nitrogen and oxygen are contributing most of the other 742 mm Hg of the theory
atmospheric pressure.
Vapor
But water vapor is a very different type of air constituent than oxygen and
application
nitrogen. Oxygen and nitrogen are always gases at Earth temperatures,
concepts
having boiling points of 90K and 77K respectively. Practically, they
always act as ideal gases. But extraordinary water has a boiling point of
100°C= 373.15K and can exist in solid, liquid and gaseous phases on the
Earth. It is essentially always in a process of dynamic exchange of
molecules between these phases. In air at 20°C, if the vapor pressure has
reached 17.54 mm Hg, then as many water molecules are entering the
liquid phase as are escaping to the gas phase, so we say that the vapor is
"saturated". It has nothing to do with the air "holding" the molecules, but
common usage often suggests that. As the air approaches saturation, we
say that we are approaching the "dewpoint". The water molecules are
polar and will exhibit some net attractive force on each other and therefore
begin to depart from ideal gas behavior. By collecting together and
entering the liquid state they can form droplets in the atmosphere to make
clouds, or near the surface to form fog, or on surfaces to form dew.
Another approach which might help clarify the point that air does not
actually "hold" water is to note that the relative humidity really has
nothing to do with the air molecules (i.e., N2 and O2). If a closed flask at
20°C had liquid water in it but no air at all, it would reach equilibrium at
the saturated vapor pressure 17.54 mm Hg. At that point it would have a
vapor density of 17.3 gm/m3 of pure water vapor in the gas phase above
the water surface. But if you had just removed the air and sealed the
container with liquid water in it, you might have a situation where there
was only 8.65 gm/m3 resident in the gas phase at that particular moment.
We would say that the relative humidity in the flask is 50% at that point
because the resident water vapor density is half its saturation density. That
is exactly the same thing we would say if the air were present - 8.65
gm/m3 of water vapor in the air at 20°C represents 50% relative humidity.
Under these conditions, water molecules would be evaporating from the
surface into the gas phase faster than they would be entering the water
surface, so the vapor pressure of the water vapor above the surface would
be rising toward the saturation vapor pressure.
Relative humidity
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