Boyle temperature

Boyle temperature is the temperature at which a non ideal gas behaves most like an ideal gas. At Boyle temperature, set the compressibility factor to 1, and one can obtain

Where a and b are van der Waals parameters.

This is the virial equation of state and describes a real gas. The Boyle temperature is formally defined as the temperature for which the second virial coefficient, becomes 0(not necessarily ). It is at this temperature that the attractive forces and the repulsive forces acting on the gas particles balance out. Since higher order virial coefficients are generally much smaller than the second coefficient, the gas tends to behave as an ideal gas over a wider range of pressures when the temperature reaches the Boyle temperature (or when or p are minimized).