A bike pump has a 2.3 cm diameter piston that can move a maximum length of 35 cm. How much work is done on the air in the pump if the initial pressure is 1 atm and the final pressure is 4.4 atm?

Answer 1

Without knowing anything about the compression we can't solve this. In general work is the area under a PV curve. You have endpoints for the pressure. And if we make a great leap of faith and assume this was done isothermally you can say V2 = P1V1/P2. And if you can figure out how many moles of gas are in 145.5 cubic cm of air (which is a mixture of gases) and you assume a temperature you can use
W = nRT ln(V2/V1).
Seems like a lot of WORK...get it WORK?
I'll shut up now.