Henry Louis Le Chatelier, a French chemist, developed a principle of chemical equilibrium in the late 1800s, which states:
A change in concentration, pressure or temperature to a system at dynamic equilibrium causes the position of the equilibrium to shift in the direction that minimises the change.
The principle is based on the thermodynamic properties of the equilibrium constant, which is dependent only on temperature for a particular reaction. Let’s see how the factors (concentration, pressure and temperature) affect the equilibria of chemical reactions in the next few articles.