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An adiabatic process (adiabatic from Ancient Greek ἀδιάβατος (adiábatos) 'impassable') is a type of thermodynamic process that occurs without transferring heat or mass between the thermodynamic system and its environment. Unlike an isothermal process, an adiabatic process transfers energy to the surroundings only as work.
An isothermal process is a type of thermodynamic process in which the temperature T of a system remains constant: ΔT = 0. This typically occurs when a system is in contact with an outside thermal reservoir, and a change in the system occurs slowly enough to allow the system to be continuously adjusted to the temperature of the reservoir through heat exchange (see quasi-equilibrium).
The Carnot cycle is a cycle composed of the totally reversible processes of isentropic compression and expansion and isothermal heat addition and rejection. The thermal efficiency of a Carnot cycle depends only on the absolute temperatures of the two reservoirs in which heat transfer takes place, and for a power cycle is:
An adiabatic process is a process in which there is no matter or heat transfer, because a thermally insulating wall separates the system from its surroundings. For the process to be natural, either (a) work must be done on the system at a finite rate, so that the internal energy of the system increases; the entropy of the system increases even ...
The adiabatic Stirling cycle is similar to the idealized Stirling cycle; however, the four thermodynamic processes are slightly different (see graph above): 180° to 270°, pseudo-isothermal expansion. The expansion space is heated externally, and the gas undergoes near-isothermal expansion.
T–s (entropy vs. temperature) diagram of an isentropic process, which is a vertical line segment. The entropy of a given mass does not change during a process that is internally reversible and adiabatic.
The dependence of work on the path of the thermodynamic process is also unrelated to reversibility, since expansion work, which can be visualized on a pressure–volume diagram as the area beneath the equilibrium curve, is different for different reversible expansion processes (e.g. adiabatic, then isothermal; vs. isothermal, then adiabatic ...
The laws of thermodynamics imply the following relations between these two heat capacities (Gaskell 2003:23): = = Here is the thermal expansion coefficient: = is the isothermal compressibility (the inverse of the bulk modulus):