Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The second law of thermodynamics establishes the concept of entropy as a physical property of a thermodynamic system. It predicts whether processes are forbidden despite obeying the requirement of conservation of energy as expressed in the first law of thermodynamics and provides necessary criteria for spontaneous processes. For example, the ...
The laws of thermodynamics are the result of progress made in this field over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first established thermodynamic principle, which eventually became the second law of thermodynamics, was formulated by Sadi Carnot in 1824 in his book Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire.
The zeroth law was not initially recognized as a separate law of thermodynamics, as its basis in thermodynamical equilibrium was implied in the other laws. The first, second, and third laws had been explicitly stated already, and found common acceptance in the physics community before the importance of the zeroth law for the definition of ...
The zeroth law is of importance in thermometry, because it implies the existence of temperature scales. In practice, C is a thermometer, and the zeroth law says that systems that are in thermodynamic equilibrium with each other have the same temperature. The law was actually the last of the laws to be formulated. First law of thermodynamics
John Earman and John D. Norton have argued that Szilárd and Landauer's explanations of Maxwell's demon begin by assuming that the second law of thermodynamics cannot be violated by the demon, and derive further properties of the demon from this assumption, including the necessity of consuming energy when erasing information, etc. [15] [16] It ...
The Clausius inequality is a consequence of applying the second law of thermodynamics at each infinitesimal stage of heat transfer. The Clausius statement states that it is impossible to construct a device whose sole effect is the transfer of heat from a cool reservoir to a hot reservoir. [ 3 ]
This follows from the first and second laws of thermodynamics and is called the principle of minimum energy. The following three statements are directly derivable from this principle. When the temperature T and external parameters of a closed system are held constant, the Helmholtz free energy F decreases and reaches a minimum value at equilibrium.
The principle of minimum energy is essentially a restatement of the second law of thermodynamics. It states that for a closed system, with constant external parameters and entropy, the internal energy will decrease and approach a minimum value at equilibrium. External parameters generally means the volume, but may include other parameters which ...