Question

Which process requires more energy: completely vaporizing 1 kg of saturated liquid water at 1 atm pressure or completely vaporizing 1 kg of saturated liquid water at 8 atm pressure?

Answer 1

The correct answer would be the first option. The process that would need more energy would be vaporizing 1 kg of saturated liquid water at a pressure of 1 atmosphere. This can be seen from the latent heat of vaporization of each system. For the saturated water at 1 atm, the latent heat is equal to 40.7 kJ per mole while, at 8 atm, the latent heat is equal to 36.4 kJ per mole. The latent heat of vaporization is the amount of heat needed in order to vaporize a specific amount of substance without any change in the temperature. As we can observe, more energy is needed by the liquid water at 1 atm.