We’ve written many blogs about our intelligent compressed air products; we have a lot of great products to talk about (our Vortex Tubes are my favorite). Occasionally, we like to talk about certain people of interest, or people that have had an impact on the compressed air industry. In this blog I am going to cover one of those people: Robert Boyle.
Born on January 25, 1627, at Lismore Castle in County Waterford, Ireland. He was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, and physicist, and he explored various other fields of study. In 1661, he published his book The Sceptical Chymist, which many regard as the cornerstone of modern chemistry.
Even though his main focus was chemistry, one of Boyle’s most notable scientific contributions is what we now call the first gas law, aptly named Boyle’s Law. Boyle’s Law explains how pressure and volume relate in a closed space when considering the mass of an ideal gas. Boyle, along with his assistant Robert Hooke, utilized a closed J-shaped tube and added mercury from the open end, which caused the air on the opposite side to compress due to the pressure. After conducting this experiment with various amounts of mercury, Boyle concluded that the pressure of a gas is inversely related to the volume it occupies.
This relationship between pressure and volume is of obvious interest to us in the compressed air industry. Nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen (the three primary components of air) are ideal gases, so are governed by this relationship. This means that if we reduce the volume of a given space, the air inside that space will increase in pressure. This principle plays a key role in various areas of air system design as well, including determining compressor output, reservoir storage, pneumatic cylinder efficiency, and more.
Sadly, on December 31, 1691, Robert Boyle passed away. However, the impact he made on fluid dynamics lives on to this day. At EXAIR we use the pressure and volume of compressed air for our products to make them quiet, safe and efficient. If you have questions about any of our quiet EXAIR Intelligent Compressed Air Products, feel free to contact EXAIR or any Application Engineer.
Al Wooffitt
Application Engineer
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