What conditions lead to the least ideal behavior?

Real gases deviate significantly from ideal gas behavior at low temperatures and high pressures. The behavior of real gases usually agrees with the predictions of the ideal gas equation to within 5% at normal temperatures and pressures.

Ideal Gas Law:

An ideal gas is a gas that conforms, in physical behaviour, to a particular, idealized relation between pressure, volume, and temperature called the ideal gas law. This law is a generalization containing both Boyle's law and Charles's law as special cases and states that for a specified quantity of gas, the product of the volume, V, and pressure, P, is proportional to the absolute temperature T; i.e., in equation form, PV = kT, in which k is a constant. Such a relation for a substance is called its equation of state and is sufficient to describe its gross behavior.

The ideal gas law can be derived from the kinetic theory of gases and relies on the assumptions that (1) the gas consists of a large number of molecules, which are in random motion and obey Newton's laws of motion; (2) the volume of the molecules is negligibly small compared to the volume occupied by the gas; and (3) no forces act on the molecules except during elastic collisions of negligible duration.

Although no gas has these properties, the behaviour of real gases is described quite closely by the ideal gas law at sufficiently high temperatures and low pressures, when relatively large distances between molecules and their high speeds overcome any interaction. A gas does not obey the equation when conditions are such that the gas, or any of the component gases in a mixture, is near its condensation point.

For more info, see Purdue.edu's Deviations from Ideal Gas Law Behavior and CK12.org's Real and Ideal Gases.

Tag: ideal gas law 
Wednesday, May 03 2017
Source: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/ideal_gas_law.html