But where does this happen? Home air compressors often do not have dryers, and many gas station compressors are just 1-5-hp tanks and lines, with either no dryer or else a dryer that doesn’t really work well. You can look at most any common air source and see that they’re not that careful or sophisticated in removing water. At the auto shop I worked at in college, none of the compressors had dryers on them. Whereas nitrogen is a manufactured product which, barring leak or accident, should not have water in it.
Ideally, with a good system and good dryer, the effect of water may not be much. But I hold that most average filling stations/air sources are likely to have a significant amount of water contamination in the air lines and tank.
I feelm as though I should clarify my portion of this discusion.
I never meant to doubt that oxygen was the smaller molecule. I was merely suprised at this fact.
As a chemist, I am well aware that oxygen is a ground state triplet (essentially that means a diradical or two unpaired electrons). It is for that reason that oxygen is so bad for the chemistry I do.
Ordinarily, one would draw a lewis dot structure for oxygen as Terminus Est did by connecting the oxygens with a double bond and leaving two lone pairs on each oxygen. The problem with this structure is that it doesn’t represent a ground state triplet.
I was incorrectly (my boss made the same mistake) creating a diradical by taking one of the bonding pairs and splitting it into two unpaired electrons. This left me with a single bond. A single bond should be much longer than a triple bond so I felt that oxygen should be larger.
Thanks to this post I learned that molecular oxygen (O2) fails when it comes to lewis dot structures. For electron couning purposes, the best way to make the ground state triplet from the stanard double bonded oxygen is to take one electron from lone pairs on both oxygens to make a third bonding pair. In other words, oxygen is also a triple bond; however, the remaining unpaired electrons exist in anti-bonding orbitals. For this reason oxygen technically has a bond order of two. If you look closely at the energy diagrams,; though, you’lle see that its not very anti-bonding. Those oxygen atoms are going to be held together quite tightly.
Add in the fact that atom sizes decrease to the left of the periodic table and it makes sense that oxygen is the smaller molecule.
If you think this is weird, you cant imagine what I learned about singlet oxygen.
Nap-time mom willl give you an extra graham cracker John W. Kennedy because your right that I’m right. I’m not sure what you think you are adding to the conversation, but I’m pretty sure I know better than you do what I’m talking about.
He’s saying you meant to say that atom size decreases to the right of the periodic table, not the left. Which I assume is what you meant to say, given that oxygen is to the right of nitrogen.