ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Gibbs isotherm

The Gibbs isotherm is like a recipe that tells us how much of something will dissolve in a liquid at a certain temperature. Imagine you have a glass of water and you want to put sugar in it. The Gibbs isotherm would tell you how much sugar you can put in the water before it stops dissolving and starts making a pile at the bottom of your cup.

The Gibbs isotherm is based on two things: the concentration of the substance you want to dissolve, and a thing called the "equilibrium constant." This is like a math equation that tells you how much of the substance will dissolve based on the concentration and temperature of the liquid.

To understand this better, let's pretend we are making lemonade. We want to know how much sugar we can dissolve in the water. We measure the concentration of the sugar and look at the Gibbs isotherm chart for our temperature. Then we use the equation to figure out how much sugar we can dissolve in the water.

Once we know how much sugar we can dissolve, we can add more or less depending on how sweet we want our lemonade to be. So the Gibbs isotherm is like a helpful guide for making sure things dissolve in liquids just the way we want them to.