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Thermodynamics (from the Greek thermos meaning heat and dynamis meaning power) is a branch of physics that studies the effects of changes in temperature, pressure, and volume on physical systems at the macroscopic scale by analyzing the collective motion of their particles using statistics. Roughly, heat means "energy in transit" and dynamics relates to "movement"; thus, in essence thermodynamics studies the movement of energy and how energy instills movement. Historically, thermodynamics developed out of the need to increase the efficiency of early steam engines.
The starting point for most thermodynamic considerations are the laws of thermodynamics, which postulate that energy can be exchanged between physical systems as heat or work. They also postulate the existence of a quantity named entropy, which can be defined for any system. In thermodynamics, interactions between large ensembles of objects are studied and categorized. Central to this are the concepts of system and surroundings. A system is composed of particles, whose average motions define its properties, which in turn are related to one another through equations of state. Properties can be combined to express internal energy and thermodynamic potentials are useful for determining conditions for equilibrium and spontaneous processes. With these tools, thermodynamics describes how systems respond to changes in their surroundings. This can be applied to a wide variety of topics in science and engineering, such as engines, phase transitions, chemical reactions, transport phenomena, and even black holes. The results of thermodynamics are essential for other fields of physics and for chemistry, chemical engineering, cell biology, biomedical engineering, and materials science to name a few.
|Short history of thermodynamics|
A short history of thermodynamics begins with the German scientist Otto von Guericke who in 1650 built and designed the world's first vacuum pump and created the world's first ever vacuum known as the Magdeburg hemispheres. He was driven to make a vacuum in order to disprove Aristotle's long-held supposition that 'Nature abhors a vacuum'. Shortly thereafter, Irish physicist and chemist Robert Boyle had learned of Guericke's designs and in 1656, in coordination with English scientist Robert Hooke, built an air pump. Using this pump, Boyle and Hooke noticed the pressure-temperature-volume correlation. In time, the ideal gas law was formulated. Then, in 1679, based on these concepts, an associate of Boyle's named Denis Papin built a bone digester, which is a closed vessel with a tightly fitting lid that confines steam until a high pressure is generated.
Later designs implemented a steam release valve to keep the machine from exploding. By watching the valve rhythmically move up and down, Papin conceived of the idea of a piston and cylinder engine. He did not however follow through with his design. Nevertheless, in 1697, based on Papin's designs, engineer Thomas Savery built the first engine. Although these early engines were crude and inefficient, they attracted the attention of the leading scientists of the time. One such scientist was Sadi Carnot, the "father of thermodynamics", who in 1824 published “Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire?, a discourse on heat, power, and engine efficiency. This marks the start of thermodynamics as a modern science.
The history of thermodynamics is a core strand in the history of physics and an important one in the history of science. Due to the relevance of thermodynamics to much of science and technology, its history is finely woven with the developments of classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, magnetism, and chemical kinetics, to more distant applied fields such as meteorology, information theory, and biology (physiology), and to technological developments such as the steam engine, internal combustion engine, cryogenics and electricity generation. The development of thermodynamics both drove and has been driven by atomic theory. It also, albeit in a subtle manner, motivated new directions in probability and statistics. It is possible to interpret the history of thermodynamics through a number of interwoven themes. The timeline of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and random processes can help to understand how these themes interacted over time.
In the western philosophical tradition, after much debate about the primal element among earlier pre-Socratic philosophers, Empedocles proposed a four-element theory, in which all substances derive from earth, water, air, and fire. The Empedoclean element of fire is perhaps the principal ancestor of later concepts such as phlogiston and caloric. Atomism is a central part of today's relationship between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. Ancient thinkers such as Leucippus and Democritus, and later the Epicureans, by advancing atomism, laid the foundations for the later atomic theory. Until experimental proof of atoms was later provided in the 20th century, the atomic theory was driven largely by philosophical considerations and scientific intuition. Consequently, ancient philosophers used atomic theory to reach conclusions that today may be viewed as immature: for example, Democritus gives a vague atomistic description of the soul, namely that it is "built from thin, smooth, and round atoms, similar to those of fire".
The theory of phlogiston arose in the 17th century, late in the period of alchemy. Its replacement by caloric theory in the 18th century is one of the historical markers of the transition from alchemy to chemistry. Phlogiston was supposed to be liberated from combustible substances during burning, and from metals during the process of rusting. The first gas law was discovered in 1662, known as Boyle's law. Charles's law was first published by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac in 1802, but he referenced unpublished work by Jacques Charles from around 1787. The relationship had been anticipated by the work of Guillaume Amontons in 1702. Gay-Lussac's law was formulated in 1802.
In 1702 Guillaume Amontons introduced the concept of absolute zero based on observations of gases. In 1810, Sir John Leslie froze water to ice artificially. The idea of absolute zero was generalised in 1848 by Lord Kelvin. In 1906, Walther Nernst stated the third law of thermodynamics. The first substantial experimental challenges to caloric theory arose in Rumford's 1798 work, though his experiments were poorly controlled, and most of the scientific establishment had enough confidence in caloric theory to believe that it could account for the results. More quantitative studies by James Prescott Joule in 1843 onwards provided soundly reproducible phenomena, but still met with scant enthusiasm. William Thomson, for example, was still trying to explain Joule's observations within a caloric framework as late as 1850. The utility and explanatory power of kinetic theory, however, soon started to displace caloric and it was largely obsolete by the end of the 19th century.
In more recent times, thermodynamics was the study of engines. A precursor of the engine was designed by the German scientist Otto von Guericke who in 1650 built and designed the world's first vacuum pump and created the world's first ever vacuum known as the Magdeburg hemispheres. He was driven to make a vacuum in order to disprove Aristotle's long-held supposition that 'Nature abhors a vacuum'. Shortly thereafter, Irish physicist and chemist Robert Boyle had learned of Guericke's designs and in 1656, in coordination with English scientist Robert Hooke, built an air pump. Using this pump, Boyle and Hooke noticed the pressure-temperature-volume correlation. In time, the ideal gas law was formulated. Then, in 1679, based on these concepts, an associate of Boyle's named Denis Papin built a bone digester, which is a closed vessel with a tightly fitting lid that confines steam until a high pressure is generated. Later designs implemented a steam release valve to keep the machine from exploding. By watching the valve rhythmically move up and down, Papin conceived of the idea of a piston and cylinder engine. He did not however follow through with his design. Nevertheless, in 1697, based on Papin’s designs, engineer Thomas Savery built the first engine. Although these early engines were crude and inefficient, they attracted the attention of the leading scientists of the time. One such scientist was Sadi Carnot, the “father of thermodynamics?, who in 1824 published “Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire?, a discourse on heat, power, and engine efficiency. This marks the start of thermodynamics as a modern science.
Hence, prior to 1698 and the invention of the Savery Engine, horses were used to power pulleys, attached to buckets, which lifted water out of flooded salt mines in England. In the years to follow, more variations of steam engines were built, such as the Newcomen Engine, and later the Watt Engine. In time, these early engines would eventually be utilized in place of horses. Thus, each engine began to be associated with a certain amount of "horse power" depending upon how many horses it had replaced! The main problem with these first engines was that they were slow and clumsy, converting less than 2% of the input fuel into useful work. In other words, large quantities of coal (or wood) had to be burned to yield only a small fraction of work output. Hence the need for a new science of engine dynamics was born.
The phenomenon of heat conduction is immediately grasped in everyday life. In 1701, Sir Isaac Newton published his law of cooling. However, in the 17th century, it came to be believed that all materials had an identical conductivity and that differences in sensation arose from their different heat capacities. Suggestions that this might not be the case came from the new science of electricity in which it was easily apparent that some materials were good electrical conductors while others were effective insulators. Jan Ingen-Housz in 1785-9 made some of the earliest measurements, as did Benjamin Thompson during the same period. The fact that warm air rises and the importance of the phenomenon to meteorology was first realised by Edmund Halley in 1686. Sir John Leslie observed that the cooling effect of a stream of air increased with its speed, in 1804.
The kinetic theory that heat is a form of motion is perhaps an ancient one and is certainly discussed by Francis Bacon in 1620 in his Novum Organum. The first written scientific reflection on the microscopic nature of heat was probably by Mikhail Lomonosov.
"(..) movement should not be denied based on the fact it is not seen. Who would deny that the leaves of trees move when rustled by a wind, despite it being unobservable from large distances? Just as in this case motion remains hidden due to perspective, it remains hidden in warm bodies due to the extremely small sizes of the moving particles. In both cases, the viewing angle is soo small that neither the object nor their movement can be seen."
— Mikhail Lomonosov
During the same years, Daniel Bernoulli published his book Hydrodynamics (1738), in which he derived an equation for the pressure of a gas considering the collisions of its atoms with the walls of a container. He proves that this pressure is two thirds the average kinetic energy of tha gas in a unit volume. Bernoulli's ideas, however, made little impact on the dominant caloric culture. Bernoulli made a connection with Gottfried Leibniz's vis viva principle, an early formulation of the principle of conservation of energy, and the two theories became intimately entwined throughout their history. Though Benjamin Thompson suggested that heat was a form of motion as a result of his experiments in 1798, no attempt was made to reconcile theoretical and experimental approaches, and it is unlikely that he was thinking of the vis viva principle.
Most cite Sadi Carnot’s 1824 paper Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire as the starting point for thermodynamics as a modern science. Carnot defined "motive power" to be the expression of the useful effect that a motor is capable of producing. Herein, Carnot introduced us to the first modern day definition of "work": weight lifted through a height. The desire to understand, via formulation, this useful effect in relation to "work" is at the core of all modern day thermodynamics. The name "thermodynamics," however, did not arrive until some twenty-five years later when, in 1849, the British mathematician and physicist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) coined the term thermodynamics in a paper on the efficiency of steam engines. In 1850, the famed mathematical physicist Rudolf Clausius originated and defined the term enthalpy H to be the total heat content of the system, stemming from the Greek word enthalpein meaning to warm, and defined the term entropy S to be the heat lost or turned into waste, stemming from the Greek word entrepein meaning to turn.
In association with Clausius, in 1871, a Scottish mathematician and physicist James Clerk Maxwell formulated a new branch of thermodynamics called Statistical Thermodynamics, which functions to analyze large numbers of particles at equilibrium, i.e., systems where no changes are occurring, such that only their average properties as temperature T, pressure P, and volume V become important. Soon thereafter, in 1875, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann formulated a precise connection between entropy S and molecular motion:
being defined in terms of the number of possible states [W] such motion could occupy, where k is the Boltzmann's constant. The following year, 1876, was a seminal point in the development of human thought. During this essential period, chemical engineer Willard Gibbs, the first person in America to be awarded a PhD in engineering (Yale), published an obscure 300-page paper titled: On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances, wherein he formulated one grand equality, the Gibbs free energy equation, which gives a measure the amount of "useful work" attainable in reacting systems. Building on these foundations, those as Lars Onsager, Erwin Schrodinger, and Ilya Prigogine, and others, functioned to bring these engine "concepts" into the thoroughfare of almost every modern-day branch of science.
Carl Wilhelm Scheele distinguished heat transfer by thermal radiation (radiant heat) from that by convection and conduction in 1777. In 1791, Pierre Prévost showed that all bodies radiate heat, no matter how hot or cold they are. In 1804, Leslie observed that a matt black surface radiates heat more effectively than a polished surface, suggesting the importance of black body radiation. Though it had become to be suspected even from Scheele's work, in 1831 Macedonio Melloni demonstrated that black body radiation could be reflected, refracted and polarised in the same way as light.
John Herapath later independently formulated a kinetic theory in 1820, but mistakenly associated temperature with momentum rather than vis viva or kinetic energy. His work ultimately failed peer review and was neglected. John James Waterston in 1843 provided a largely accurate account, again independently, but his work received the same reception, failing peer review even from someone as well-disposed to the kinetic principle as Davy. Further progress in kinetic theory started only in the middle of the XIX century, with the works of Rudolf Clausius, James Clerk Maxwell, and Ludwig Boltzmann. In his 1857 work On the nature of the motion called heat, Clausius for the first time clearly states that heat is the average kinetic energy of molecules. This interested Maxwell, who in 1859 derived the momentum distribution later named after him. Boltzmann subsequently generalized his distribution for the case of gases in external fields. Boltzmann is perhaps the most significant contributor to kinetic theory, as he introduced many of the fundamental concepts in the theory. Besides the Boltzmann distribution mentioned above, he also associated the kinetic energy of particles with their degrees of freedom. The Boltzmann equation for the distribution function of a gas in non-equilibrium states is still the most effective equation for studying transport phenomena in gases and metals. By introducing the concept of thermodynamic probability as the number of microstates corresponding to the current macrostate, he showed that its logarithm is proportional to entropy.
Even though he was working with the caloric theory, Sadi Carnot in 1824 suggested that some of the caloric available for generating useful work is lost in any real process. In March 1851, while grappling to come to terms with the work of James Prescott Joule, Lord Kelvin started to speculate that there was an inevitable loss of useful heat in all processes. The idea was framed even more dramatically by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1854, giving birth to the spectre of the heat death of the universe. In 1854, William John Macquorn Rankine started to make use in calculation of what he called his thermodynamic function. This has subsequently been shown to be identical to the concept of entropy formulated by Rudolf Clausius in 1865. Clausius used the concept to develop his classic statement of the second law of thermodynamics the same year.
James Clerk Maxwell's 1862 insight that both light and radiant heat were forms of electromagnetic wave led to the start of the quantitative analysis of thermal radiation. In 1879, Jožef Stefan observed that the total radiant flux from a blackbody is proportional to the fourth power of its temperature and stated the Stefan-Boltzmann law. The law was derived theoretically by Ludwig Boltzmann in 1884.
Classical thermodynamics is the original early 1800s variation of thermodynamics concerned with thermodynamic states, and properties as energy, work, and heat, and with the laws of thermodynamics, all lacking an atomic interpretation. In precursory form, classical thermodynamics derives from physicist Robert Boyle’s 1662 postulate that the pressure P of a given quantity of gas varies inversely as its volume V at constant temperature; i.e. in equation form: PV = k, a constant. From here, a semblance of a thermo-science began to develop with the construction of the first successful atmospheric steam engines in England by Thomas Savery in 1697 and Thomas Newcomen in 1712. The first and second laws of thermodynamics emerged simultaneously in the 1850s, primarily out of the works of William Rankine, Rudolf Clausius, and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin). The latter coined the term thermodynamics in his 1849 publication An Account of Carnot's Theory of the Motive Power of Heat. The first thermodynamic textbook was written in 1859 by William Rankine, a civil and mechanical engineering professor at the University of Glasgow.
With the development of atomic and molecular theories in the late 1800s and early 1900s, thermodynamics was given a molecular interpretation. This field is called statistical thermodynamics, which can be thought of as a bridge between macroscopic and microscopic properties of systems. Essentially, statistical thermodynamics is an approach to thermodynamics situated upon statistical mechanics, which focuses on the derivation of macroscopic results from first principles. It can be opposed to its historical predecessor phenomenological thermodynamics, which gives scientific descriptions of phenomena with avoidance of microscopic details. The statistical approach is to derive all macroscopic properties (temperature, volume, pressure, energy, entropy, etc.) from the properties of moving constituent particles and the interactions between them (including quantum phenomena). It was found to be very successful and thus is commonly used.
Chemical thermodynamics is the study of the interrelation of heat with chemical reactions or with a physical change of state within the confines of the laws of thermodynamics. During the years 1873-76 the American mathematical physicist Willard Gibbs published a series of three papers, the most famous being On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances, in which he showed how thermodynamic processes could be graphically analyzed, by studying the energy, entropy, volume, temperature and pressure of the thermodynamic system, in such a manner to determine if a process would occur spontaneously. During the early 20th century, chemists such as Gilbert Lewis, Merle Randall, and E. A. Guggenheim began to apply the mathematical methods of Gibbs to the analysis of chemical processes.
Systems, parameters, and states
An important concept in thermodynamics is the “system?. A system is the region of the universe under study. A system is separated from the remainder of the universe by a boundary which may be imaginary or not, but which by convention delimits a finite volume. The possible exchanges of work, heat, or matter between the system and the surroundings take place across this boundary. There are five dominant classes of systems:
- Isolated Systems – matter and energy may not cross the boundary.
- Adiabatic Systems – heat may not cross the boundary.
- Diathermic Systems - heat may cross boundary.
- Closed Systems – matter may not cross the boundary.
- Open Systems – heat, work, and matter may cross the boundary.
For isolated systems, as time goes by, internal differences in the system tend to even out; pressures and temperatures tend to equalize, as do density differences. A system in which all equalizing processes have gone practically to completion, is considered to be in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium.
In thermodynamic equilibrium, a system's properties are, by definition, unchanging in time. Systems in equilibrium are much simpler and easier to understand than systems which are not in equilibrium. Often, when analyzing a thermodynamic process, it can be assumed that each intermediate state in the process is at equilibrium. This will also considerably simplify the situation. Thermodynamic processes which develop so slowly as to allow each intermediate step to be an equilibrium state are said to be reversible processes.
The central concept of thermodynamics is that of energy, the ability to do work. As stipulated by the first law, the total energy of the system and its surroundings is conserved. It may be transferred into a body by heating, compression, or addition of matter, and extracted from a body either by cooling, expansion, or extraction of matter. For comparison, in mechanics, energy transfer results from a force which causes displacement, the product of the two being the amount of energy transferred. In a similar way, thermodynamic systems can be thought of as transferring energy as the result of a generalized force causing a generalized displacement, with the product of the two being the amount of energy transferred. These thermodynamic force-displacement pairs are known as conjugate variables. The most common conjugate thermodynamic variables are pressure-volume (mechanical parameters), temperature-entropy (thermal parameters), and chemical potential-particle number (material parameters).
When a system is at equilibrium under a given set of conditions, the thermodynamic state is said to be in a "definite state". The state of the system can be described by a number of intensive variables and extensive variables. The properties of the system can be described by an equation of state which specifies the relationship between these variables. State may be thought of as the instantaneous quantitative description of a system with a set number of variables held constant.
A thermodynamic process may be defined as the energetic evolution of a thermodynamic system proceeding from an initial state to a final state. Typically, each thermodynamic process is distinguished from other processes, in energetic character, according to what parameters, as temperature, pressure, or volume, etc., are held fixed. Furthermore, it is useful to group these processes into pairs, in which each variable held constant is one member of a conjugate pair. The six most common thermodynamic processes are shown below:
- An isobaric process occurs at constant pressure.
- An isochoric process, or isometric/isovolumetric process, occurs at constant volume.
- An isothermal process occurs at a constant temperature.
- An isentropic process occurs at a constant entropy.
- An isenthalpic process occurs at a constant enthalpy.
- An adiabatic process occurs without loss or gain of heat..
The laws of thermodynamics
In thermodynamics, there are four laws of very general validity, and as such they do not depend on the details of the interactions or the systems being studied. Hence, they can be applied to systems about which one knows nothing other than the balance of energy and matter transfer. Examples of this include Einstein's prediction of spontaneous emission around the turn of the 20th century and current research into the thermodynamics of black holes.
The four laws are:
- Zeroth law of thermodynamics
- Thermodynamic equilibrium is an equivalence relation. If two thermodynamic systems are in thermal equilibrium with a third, they are also in thermal equilibrium with each other.
- First law of thermodynamics
- Conservation of energy. The increase in the energy of a closed system is equal to the amount of energy added to the system by heating, minus the amount lost in the form of work done by the system on its surroundings.
- Second law of thermodynamics
- Entropy. The total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value.
- Third law of thermodynamics
- Absolute zero temperature. As a system asymptotically approaches absolute zero of temperature all processes virtually cease and the entropy of the system asymptotically approaches a minimum value.
As can be derived from the energy balance equation on a thermodynamic system there exist energetic quantities called thermodynamic potentials, being the quantitative measure of the stored energy in the system. The four most well known potentials are:
|Helmholtz free energy|
|Gibbs free energy|
Potentials are used to measure energy changes in systems as they evolve from an initial state to a final state. The potential used depends on the constraints of the system, such as constant temperature or pressure. Internal energy is the internal energy of the system, enthalpy is the internal energy of the system plus the energy related to pressure-volume work, and Helmholtz and Gibbs free energy are the energies available in a system to do useful work when the temperature and volume or the pressure and temperature are fixed, respectively.
There are two types of thermodynamic instruments, the meter and the reservoir. A thermodynamic meter is any device which measures any parameter of a thermodynamic system. In some cases, the thermodynamic parameter is actually defined in terms of an idealized measuring instrument. For example, the zeroth law states that if two bodies are in thermal equilibrium with a third body, they are also in thermal equilibrium with each other. This principle, as noted by James Maxwell in 1872, asserts that it is possible to measure temperature. An idealized thermometer is a sample of an ideal gas at constant pressure. From the ideal gas law PV=nRT, the volume of such a sample can be used as an indicator of temperature; in this manner it defines temperature. Although pressure is defined mechanically, a pressure-measuring device, called a barometer may also be constructed from a sample of an ideal gas held at a constant temperature. A calorimeter is a device which is used to measure and define the internal energy of a system.
A thermodynamic reservoir is a system which is so large that it does not appreciably alter its state parameters when brought into contact with the test system. It is used to impose a particular value of a state parameter upon the system. For example, a pressure reservoir is a system at a particular pressure, which imposes that pressure upon any test system that it is mechanically connected to. The earth's atmosphere is often used as a pressure reservoir. It is important that these two types of instruments are distinct. A meter does not perform its task accurately if it behaves like a reservoir of the state variable it is trying to measure. If, for example, a thermometer, were to act as a temperature reservoir it would alter the temperature of the system being measured, and the reading would be incorrect. Ideal meters have no effect on the state variables of the system they are measuring.
External articles and references
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- Black W. & Hartley, J. (1996). Thermodynamics, 3rd Ed. (textbook). New York: Harper Collins.
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- Nash, Leonard K. (1974). Elements of Statistical Thermodynamics, 2nd Ed.. Dover Publications, Inc.. ISBN 0486449785.
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- Kroemer, Herbert; Kittel, Charles (1980). Thermal Physics. W. H. Freeman Company. ISBN 0716710889.
- Goldstein, Martin; Inge, F (1993). The Refrigerator and the Universe. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674753259.
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- Statistical Thermodynamics - Historical Timeline
- Major Equations and Derivations - Statistical Thermodynamics
- Introduction to Stastical Thermodynamics - Penn State Polymer Physics Group
- Statistical Thermodynamics - University of Colorado at Boulder
- Table of Contents - for Statistical Thermodynamics
- Thermodynamics at ScienceWorld
- History of Thermodynamics
- Shakespeare & Thermodynamics
- Biochemistry Thermodynamics
- 180+ Variations of the 5 Laws
- Thermodynamic Evolution