PHYS 1050 Lecture Notes - Lecture 30: Thermal Energy, Thermodynamics
14 Apr 2016
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Document Summary
Thermodynamics: the study of heat and its transformation to different forms of energy. Entropy: a measure of the disorder in a system. Absolute zero: the lowest possible temperature that a substance may have. Adiabatic process: a process, often of fast expansion or compression, where no heat enters or leaves a system. Heat engine: a device that uses heat as an input and supplies mechanical work as output. Internal energy: the total energy of the submicroscopic particles that make up a substance. Work: product of the force of an object and the distance the object moved. Ideal efficiency: upper limit of efficiency for all heat engines. It depends on temperature difference between input and output. 1st law of thermodynamics: the heat added to a system equals its increase in internal energy plus the external work it does on its environment. 2nd law of thermodynamics: thermal energy never spontaneously flows from a cold object to a hot object.
