Thermodynamics - Real-life applications
Hot and "Cold"
Earlier, it was stated that there is no such thing as "cold"—a statement hard to believe for someone who happens to be in Buffalo, New York, or International Falls, Minnesota, during a February blizzard. Certainly, cold is real as a sensory experience, but in physical terms, cold is not a "thing"—it is simply the absence of heat.
People will say, for instance, that they put an ice cube in a cup of coffee to cool it, but in terms of physics, this description is backward: what actually happens is that heat flows from the coffee to the ice, thus raising its temperature. The resulting temperature is somewhere between that of the ice cube and the coffee, but one cannot obtain the value simply by averaging the two temperatures at the beginning of the transfer.
For one thing, the volume of the water in the ice cube is presumably less than that of the water in the coffee, not to mention the fact that their differing chemical properties may have some minor effect on the interaction. Most important, however, is the fact that the coffee did not simply merge with the ice: in transferring heat to the ice cube, the molecules in the coffee expended some of their internal kinetic energy, losing further heat in the process.
COOLING MACHINES.
Even cooling machines, such as refrigerators and air conditioners, actually use heat, simply reversing the usual process by which particles are heated. The refrigerator pulls heat from its inner compartment—the area where food and other perishables are stored—and transfers it to the region outside. This is why the back of a refrigerator is warm.
Inside the refrigerator is an evaporator, into which heat from the refrigerated compartment flows. The evaporator contains a refrigerant—a gas, such as ammonia or Freon 12, that readily liquifies. This gas is released into a pipe from the evaporator at a low pressure, and as a result, it evaporates, a process that cools it. The pipe takes the refrigerant to the compressor, which pumps it into the condenser at a high pressure. Located at the back of the refrigerator, the condenser is a long series of pipes in which pressure turns the gas into liquid. As it moves through the condenser, the gas heats, and this heat is released into the air around the refrigerator.
An air conditioner works in a similar manner. Hot air from the room flows into the evaporator, and a compressor circulates refrigerant from the evaporator to a condenser. Behind the evaporator is a fan, which draws in hot air from the room, and another fan pushes heat from the condenser to the outside. As with a refrigerator, the back of an air conditioner is hot because it is moving heat from the area to be cooled.
Thus, cooling machines do not defy the principles of heat discussed above; nor do they defy the laws of thermodynamics that will be discussed at the conclusion of this essay. In accordance with the second law, in order to move heat in the reverse of its usual direction, external energy is required. Thus, a refrigerator takes in energy from a electric power supply (that is, the outlet it is plugged into), and extracts heat. Nonetheless, it manages to do so efficiently, removing two or three times as much heat from its inner compartment as the amount of energy required to run the refrigerator.
Transfers of Heat
It is appropriate now to discuss how heat is transferred. One must remember, again, that in order for heat to be transferred from one point to another, there must be a difference of temperature between those two points. If an object or system has a uniform level of internal thermal energy—no matter how "hot" it may be in ordinary terms—no heat transfer is taking place.
Heat is transferred by one of three methods: conduction, which involves successive molecular collisions; convection, which requires the motion of hot fluid from one place to another; or radiation, which involves electromagnetic waves and requires no physical medium for the transfer.
CONDUCTION.
Conduction takes place best in solids and particularly in metals, whose molecules are packed in relatively close proximity. Thus, when one end of an iron rod is heated, eventually the other end will acquire heat due to conduction. Molecules of liquid or nonmetallic solids vary in their ability to conduct heat, but gas—due to the loose attractions between its molecules—is a poor conductor.
When conduction takes place, it is as though a long line of people are standing shoulder to shoulder, passing a secret down the line. In this case, however, the "secret" is kinetic thermal energy. And just as the original phrasing of the secret will almost inevitably become garbled by the time it gets to the tenth or hundredth person, some energy is lost in the transfer from molecule to molecule. Thus, if one end of the iron rod is sitting in a fire and one end is surrounded by air at room temperature, it is unlikely that the end in the air will ever get as hot as the end in the fire.
Incidentally, the qualities that make metallic solids good conductors of heat also make them good conductors of electricity. In the first instance, kinetic energy is being passed from molecule to molecule, whereas in an electrical field, electrons—freed from the atoms of which they are normally a part—are able to move along the line of molecules. Because plastic is much less conductive than metal, an electrician will use a screwdriver with a plastic handle. Similarly, a metal pan typically has a handle of wood or plastic.
CONVECTION.
There is a term, "convection oven," that is actually a redundancy: all ovens heat through convection, the principal means of transferring heat through a fluid. In physics, "fluid" refers both to liquids and gases—anything that tends to flow. Instead of simply moving heat, as in conduction, convection involves the movement of heated material—that is, fluid. When air is heated, it displaces cold (that is, unheated) air in its path, setting up a convection current.
Convection takes place naturally, as for instance when hot air rises from the land on a warm day. This heated air has a lower density than that of the less heated air in the atmosphere above it, and, therefore, is buoyant. As it rises, however, it loses energy and cools. This cooled air, now more dense than the air around it, sinks again, creating a repeating cycle.
The preceding example illustrates natural convection; the heat of an oven, on the other hand, is an example of forced convection—a situation in which some sort of pump or mechanism moves heated fluid. So, too, is the cooling work of a refrigerator, though the refrigerator moves heat in the opposite direction.
Forced convection can also take place within a natural system. The human heart is a pump, and blood carries excess heat generated by the body to the skin. The heat passes through the skin by means of conduction, and at the surface of the skin, it is removed from the body in a number of ways, primarily by the cooling evaporation of moisture—that is, perspiration.
RADIATION.
If the Sun is hot—hot enough to severely burn the skin of a person who spends too much time exposed to its rays—then why is it cold in the upper atmosphere? After all, the upper atmosphere is closer to the Sun. And why is it colder still in the empty space above the atmosphere, which is still closer to the Sun? The reason is that in outer space there is no medium for convection, and in the upper atmosphere, where the air molecules are very far apart, there is hardly any medium. How, then, does heat come to the Earth from the Sun? By radiation, which is radically different from conduction or convection. The other two involve ordinary thermal energy, but radiation involves electromagnetic energy.
A great deal of "stuff" travels through the electromagnetic spectrum, discussed in another essay in this book: radio waves, microwaves for television and radar, infrared light, visible light, x rays, gamma rays. Though the relatively narrow band of visible-light wavelengths is the only part of the spectrum of which people are aware in everyday life, other parts—particularly the infrared and ultraviolet bands—are involved in the heat one feels from the Sun. (Ultraviolet rays, in fact, cause sunburns.)
Heat by means of radiation is not as "other-worldly" as it might seem: in fact, one does not have to point to the Sun for examples of it. Any time an object glows as a result of heat—as for example, in the case of firelight—that is an example of radiation. Some radiation is emitted in the form of visible light, but the heat component is in infrared rays. This also occurs in an incandescent light bulb. In an incandescent bulb, incidentally, much of the energy is lost to the heat of infrared rays, and the efficiency of a fluorescent bulb lies in the fact that it converts what would otherwise be heat into usable light.
The Laws of Thermodynamics
Having explored the behavior of heat, both at the molecular level and at levels more easily perceived by the senses, it is possible to discuss the laws of thermodynamics alluded to throughout this essay. These laws illustrate the relationships between heat and energy examined earlier, and
The story of how these laws came to be discovered is a saga unto itself, involving the contributions of numerous men in various places over a period of more than a century. In 1791, Swiss physicist Pierre Prevost (1751-1839) put forth his theory of exchanges, stating correctly that all bodies radiate heat. Hence, as noted earlier, there is no such thing as "cold": when one holds snow in one's hand, cold does not flow from the snow into the hand; rather, heat flows from the hand to the snow.
Seven years later, an American-British physicist named Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753) was boring a cannon with a blunt drill when he noticed that this action generated a great deal of heat. This led him to question the prevailing wisdom, which maintained that heat was a fluid form of matter; instead, Thompson began to suspect that heat must arise from some form of motion.
CARNOT'S ENGINE.
The next major contribution came from the French physicist and engineer Sadi Carnot (1796-1832). Though he published only one scientific work, Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire (1824), this treatise caused a great stir in the European scientific community. In it, Carnot made the first attempt at a scientific definition of work, describing it as "weight lifted through a height." Even more important was his proposal for a highly efficient steam engine.
A steam engine, like a modern-day internal combustion engine, is an example of a larger class of machine called heat engine. A heat engine absorbs heat at a high temperature, performs mechanical work, and, as a result, gives off heat a lower temperature. (The reason why that temperature must be lower is established in the second law of thermodynamics.)
For its era, the steam engine was what the computer is today: representing the cutting edge in technology, it was the central preoccupation of those interested in finding new ways to accomplish old tasks. Carnot, too, was fascinated by the steam engine, and was determined to help overcome its disgraceful inefficiency: in operation, a steam engine typically lost as much as 95% of its heat energy.
In his Reflections, Carnot proposed that the maximum efficiency of any heat engine was equal to (T H -T L )/T H , where T H is the highest operating temperature of the machine, and T L the lowest. In order to maximize this value, T L has to be absolute zero, which is impossible to reach, as was later illustrated by the third law of thermodynamics.
In attempting to devise a law for a perfectly efficient machine, Carnot inadvertently proved that such a machine is impossible. Yet his work influenced improvements in steam engine design, leading to levels of up to 80% efficiency. In addition, Carnot's studies influenced Kelvin—who actually coined the term "thermodynamics"—and others.
THE FIRST LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS.
During the 1840s, Julius Robert Mayer (1814-1878), a German physicist, published several papers in which he expounded the principles known today as the conservation of energy and the first law of thermodynamics. As discussed earlier, the conservation of energy shows that within a system isolated from all outside factors, the total amount of energy remains the same, though transformations of energy from one form to another take place.
The first law of thermodynamics states this fact in a somewhat different manner. As with the other laws, there is no definitive phrasing; instead, there are various versions, all of which say the same thing. One way to express the law is as follows: Because the amount of energy in a system remains constant, it is impossible to perform work that results in an energy output greater than the energy input. For a heat engine, this means that the work output of the engine, combined with its change in internal energy, is equal to its heat input. Most heat engines, however, operate in a cycle, so there is no net change in internal energy.
Earlier, it was stated that a refrigerator extracts two or three times as much heat from its inner compartment as the amount of energy required to run it. On the surface, this seems to contradict the first law: isn't the refrigerator putting out more energy than it received? But the heat it extracts is only part of the picture, and not the most important part from the perspective of the first law.
A regular heat engine, such as a steam or internal-combustion engine, pulls heat from a high-temperature reservoir to a low-temperature reservoir, and, in the process, work is accomplished. Thus, the hot steam from the high-temperature reservoir makes possible the accomplishment of work, and when the energy is extracted from the steam, it condenses in the low-temperature reservoir as relatively cool water.
A refrigerator, on the other hand, reverses this process, taking heat from a low-temperature reservoir (the evaporator inside the cooling compartment) and pumping it to a high-temperature reservoir outside the refrigerator. Instead of producing a work output, as a steam engine does, it requires a work input—the energy supplied via the wall outlet. Of course, a refrigerator does produce an "output," by cooling the food inside, but the work it performs in doing so is equal to the energy supplied for that purpose.
THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS.
Just a few years after Mayer's exposition of the first law, another German physicist, Rudolph Julius Emanuel Clausius (1822-1888) published an early version of the second law of thermodynamics. In an 1850 paper, Clausius stated that "Heat cannot, of itself, pass from a colder to a hotter body." He refined this 15 years later, introducing the concept of entropy—the tendency of natural systems toward breakdown, and specifically, the tendency for the energy in a system to be dissipated.
The second law of thermodynamics begins from the fact that the natural flow of heat is always from a high-temperature reservoir to a low-temperature reservoir. As a result, no engine can be constructed that simply takes heat from a source and performs an equivalent amount of work: some of the heat will always be lost. In other words, it is impossible to build a perfectly efficient engine.
Though its relation to the first law is obvious, inasmuch as it further defines the limitations of machine output, the second law of thermodynamics is not derived from the first. Elsewhere in this volume, the first law of thermodynamics—stated as the conservation of energy law—is discussed in depth, and, in that context, it is in fact necessary to explain how the behavior of machines in the real world does not contradict the conservation law.
Even though they mean the same thing, the first law of thermodynamics and the conservation of energy law are expressed in different ways. The first law of thermodynamics states that "the glass is half empty," whereas the conservation of energy law shows that "the glass is half full." The thermodynamics law emphasizes the bad news: that one can never get more energy out of a machine than the energy put into it. Thus, all hopes of a perpetual motion machine were dashed. The conservation of energy, on the other hand, stresses the good news: that energy is never lost.
In this context, the second law of thermodynamics delivers another dose of bad news: though it is true that energy is never lost, the energy available for work output will never be as great as the energy put into a system. A car engine, for instance, cannot transform all of its energy input into usable horsepower; some of the energy will be used up in the form of heat and sound. Though energy is conserved, usable energy is not.
Indeed, the concept of entropy goes far beyond machines as people normally understand them. Entropy explains why it is easier to break something than to build it—and why, for each person, the machine called the human body will inevitably break down and die, or cease to function, someday.
THE THIRD LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS.
The subject of entropy leads directly to the third law of thermodynamics, formulated by German chemist Hermann Walter Nernst (1864-1941) in 1905. The third law states that at the temperature of absolute zero, entropy also approaches zero. From this statement, Nernst deduced that absolute zero is therefore impossible to reach.
All matter is in motion at the molecular level, which helps define the three major phases of matter found on Earth. At one extreme is a gas, whose molecules exert little attraction toward one another, and are therefore in constant motion at a high rate of speed. At the other end of the phase continuum (with liquids somewhere in the middle) are solids. Because they are close together, solid particles move very little, and instead of moving in relation to one another, they merely vibrate in place. But they do move.
Absolute zero, or 0K on the Kelvin scale of temperature, is the point at which all molecular motion stops entirely—or at least, it virtually stops. (In fact, absolute zero is defined as the temperature at which the motion of the average atom or molecule is zero.) As stated earlier, Carnot's engine achieves perfect efficiency if its lowest temperature is the same as absolute zero; but the second law of thermodynamics shows that a perfectly efficient machine is impossible. This means that absolute zero is an unreachable extreme, rather like matter exceeding the speed of light, also an impossibility.
This does not mean that scientists do not attempt to come as close as possible to absolute zero, and indeed they have come very close. In 1993, physicists at the Helsinki University of Technology Low Temperature Laboratory in Finland used a nuclear demagnetization device to achieve a temperature of 2.8 · 10 −10 K, or 0.00000000028K. This means that a fragment equal to only 28 parts in 100 billion separated this temperature from absolute zero—but it was still above 0K. Such extreme low-temperature research has a number of applications, most notably with superconductors, materials that exhibit virtually no resistance to electrical current at very low temperatures.
WHERE TO LEARN MORE
Beiser, Arthur. Physics, 5th ed. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1991.
Brown, Warren. Alternative Sources of Energy. Introduction by Russell E. Train. New York: Chelsea House, 1994.
Encyclopedia of Thermodynamics (Web site). <http://therion.minpet.unibas.ch/minpet/groups/thermodict/> (April 12, 2001).
Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (Web site). <http://www.2ndlaw.com> (April 12, 2001).
Fleisher, Paul. Matter and Energy: Principles of Matter and Thermodynamics. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner Publications, 2002.
Macaulay, David. The New Way Things Work. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.
Moran, Jeffrey B. How Do We Know the Laws of Thermodynamics? New York: Rosen Publishing Group, 2001.
Santrey, Laurence. Heat. Illustrated by Lloyd Birmingham. Mahwah, N.J.: Troll Associates, 1985.
Suplee, Curt. Everyday Science Explained. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1996.
"Temperature and Thermodynamics" PhysLINK.com (Web site). <http://www.physlink.com/ae_thermo.cfm> (April 12, 2001).