A New Perspective on Thermodynamics

ISBN-13: 9781441914293 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 207 str.

Bernard H. Lavenda

Opis

More than to any other single individual, thermodynamics owes its creation to Nicolas-Leonard-Sadi Carnot. Sadi, the son of the "great Carnot" Lazare, was he- ily in uencedby his father. Not onlywas LazareMinister of War duringNapoleon's consulate, he was a respected mathematician and engineer in his own right. Ma- ematically, Lazare can lay claim to the de nition of the cross ratio, a projective invariant of four points. Lazare was also interested in how machines operated, - phasizing the roles of work and "vis viva," or living force, which was later to be associated with the kinetic energy. He arrived at a dynamical theory that machines in order to operate at maximum ef ciency should avoid "any impact or sudden change. " This was the heritage he left to his son Sadi. The mechanics of Newton, in his Principia, was more than a century old. It dealt with the mechanics of conservative systems in which there was no room for p- cesses involving heat and friction. Such processes would ruin the time reversibility of mechanical laws, which could no longer be derived by minimizing the difference between kinetic and potential energies. When Sadi wrote his only scienti c work in 1824, there were no laws governing the mechanical effects of heat. In fact, caloric theory was still in vogue, which treated heat as an imponderable uid that was c- served.

Recenzje

From the reviews:

"In six chapters, the author describes the fundamental principles of thermodynamics, starting from Carnot's works and ending with nonextensive thermodynamics. ... Throughout the whole book, the author shows the power of Carnot works. He always quotes citations and computations from these original works, then considering criticisms and possible extensions. Students and researchers involved in the fundamentals of thermodynamics will surely be interested by this historical presentation of the thermodynamics starting from the pioneering works by Carnot and going to some recent extensions." (Alain Brillard, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1186, 2010)

Spis treści

The Predecessors of Carnot.- Thermodynamics from Carnot to Clausius and Kelvin.- Thermodynamics in a Carnot Equation.- Equivalence of First and Second Laws.- Work from Nonequilibrium Systems.- Nonextensive Thermodynamics.

Blurb

Dr. Bernard H. Lavenda has written A New Perspective on Thermodynamics to combine an old look at thermodynamics with a new foundation. The book presents a historical perspective, which unravels the current presentation of thermodynamics found in standard texts, and which emphasizes the fundamental role that Carnot played in the development of thermodynamics.

A New Perspective on Thermodynamics will:

• Chronologically unravel the development of the principles of thermodynamics and how they were conceived by their discoverers
• Bring the theory of thermodynamics up to the present time and indicate areas of further development with the union of information theory and the theory of means and their inequalities. New areas include nonextensive thermodynamics, the thermodynamics of coding theory, multifractals, and strange attractors.
• Reintroduce important, yet nearly forgotten, teachings of N.L. Sardi Carnot
• Highlight conceptual flaws in timely topics such as endoreversible engines, finite-time thermodynamics, geometrization of thermodynamics, and nonequilibrium work from equilibrium free energy differences.

Dr. Bernard H. Lavenda is Professor of Physical Chemistry at Universita degli Studi di Camerino, Italy. He is recipient of the 2009 Telesio-Galeli Prize in Physics for his work on irreversible thermodynamics.