Henry's Law: A Retrospective

Abstract

This article reviews the evolution of Henry's law from its original form as a description of the effect of pressure on the solubility of a gas through a description of the vapor pressure of a volatile solute in dilute solution to a basis of the standard state of a solute. We also relate Henry's law to the properties of regular solutions. We raise the question of whether Henry's law is applicable to any finite concentration and conclude that it is properly only a limiting law in the limit of infinite dilution.

The jet aerator as oxygen supplier for the electrochemical generation of H2O2

“…Those systems may suffer from important mass transfer limitations, normally leading to low limiting current densities. An increase in the saturation level can be obtained, according to Henry's Law [18,19], by increasing the pressure of the system [8]. Nevertheless, both strategies would lead to an increase in the operating and investment costs of the technology.…”

Hydrophobic Solvation: Aqueous Methane Solutions

“…An interesting application of Henry's law to noisy knuckles was provided by Kimborough (1) in 1999. Two articles (2,3) published recently in this Journal are more closely related to the ideas presented here. The first describes experiments on the hydrophobic solvation of toluene (2) and the second provides a brief review of Henry's law (3).…”

Concise physical chemistry

“…According to Henry's law, the partial pressure, is the linear function found at the limit of infinitely dilute solutions (in practice, very dilute solutions). Like the ideal gas law, it is a limiting law (Rosenberg and Peticolas, 2004). At relatively high concentrations of solute B, Henry's law is a poor approximation but it is clear from Fig.…”