Clausius–Clapeyron Equation (Two-Point Form)
Also known as clausius clapeyron · heat of vaporization from vapor pressure · vapour pressure temperature · boiling point elevation with altitude
Enter your known values, leave one input blank, and solves for the missing one. Try different units for next level excitement!
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Integrate the Clapeyron equation with the two honest simplifications, that the vapour is ideal and that does not change over the interval, and this two-point form falls out. It is the workhorse for turning two boiling points into an enthalpy of vaporisation, or one boiling point into all the others. A liquid boiling at 373.15 K under one atmosphere and at 354.75 K under half an atmosphere has , which is water to within a couple of percent.
Run it forward on water from 100 °C down to 80 °C with and it predicts 48.2 kPa. Steam tables say 47.4 kPa. That 1.7% gap is not an arithmetic error, it is the cost of holding constant across 20 K, and it grows fast as you widen the interval. Near the critical point collapses towards zero and the equation fails outright.
The unglamorous mistake is temperature units. Both temperatures go in as absolute values, because they appear as and the reciprocal of a Celsius reading is meaningless. This page takes any temperature unit and converts, but if you are working the equation on paper, convert to kelvin first. The unexpected use, incidentally, is in the kitchen and on mountains: the same equation, run backwards, tells you that at 3000 m water boils near 90 °C, which is why high-altitude cooking directions exist.
- = Vapour pressure at T₁ (kPa)
- = Temperature 1 (°C)
- = Vapour pressure at T₂ (kPa)
- = Temperature 2 (°C)
- = Enthalpy of vaporisation (kJ/mol)
- Vapour pressure at T₁ — Antoine Equation (Vapour Pressure), Gas Density from Molar Mass
- Temperature 1 — Antoine Equation (Vapour Pressure), Van der Waals Equation of State
- Vapour pressure at T₂ — Antoine Equation (Vapour Pressure), Gas Density from Molar Mass
- Temperature 2 — Antoine Equation (Vapour Pressure), Van der Waals Equation of State
- Enthalpy of vaporisation — Gibbs Free Energy Change (ΔG = ΔH − TΔS), Heat of Reaction