Kinetic Theory of Gases
Fill a box with gas particles at a chosen temperature and count — watch them bounce elastically off the walls with speeds drawn from the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, and see average kinetic energy track temperature exactly.
Preview — sign up free to change the numbers yourself
What you can adjust
- Temperature
- 50 – 1000 K
- Particle count
- 10 – 150
Higher temperature means a higher average kinetic energy per particle — watch the dots speed up and hit the walls harder.
How many gas particles are in the box.
About this simulation
What it shows
Gas particles bounce around a box and off its walls, coloured from slow to fast, with a count of how many there are.
The key idea
Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of the particles. Their speeds are spread out in a Maxwell-Boltzmann pattern, and the pressure comes from the particles hitting the walls.
Try this
Raise Temperature from 300 K to 900 K: the average kinetic energy triples, so the particles move about 1.7 times faster on average.
The box is flat (two-dimensional) and the particles bounce off the walls but not off each other. That is enough to show how temperature relates to speed.