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In 1854, the noun thermo-dynamics is used by Thomson and William Rankine to represent the science of generalized heat engines. [25] [21] Pierre Perrot claims that the term thermodynamics was coined by James Joule in 1858 to designate the science of relations between heat and power, [12] however, Joule never used that term, but used instead the ...
The history of thermodynamics is fundamentally interwoven with the history of physics and the history of chemistry, and ultimately dates back to theories of heat in antiquity. The laws of thermodynamics are the result of progress made in this field over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In classical thermodynamics, a commonly considered model is the heat engine. It consists of four bodies: the working body, the hot reservoir, the cold reservoir, and the work reservoir. A cyclic process leaves the working body in an unchanged state, and is envisaged as being repeated indefinitely often.
The first law of thermodynamics is a formulation of the law of conservation of energy in the context of thermodynamic processes.The law distinguishes two principal forms of energy transfer, heat and thermodynamic work, that modify a thermodynamic system containing a constant amount of matter.
This is a consequence of the first law of thermodynamics, as for the total system's energy to remain the same; + = (+) =, so therefore = (), where (1) the sign convention of heat is used in which heat entering into (leaving from) an engine is positive (negative) and (2) is obtained by the definition of efficiency of the engine when the engine ...
The first law of thermodynamics is essentially a definition of heat, i.e. heat is the change in the internal energy of a system that is not caused by a change of the external parameters of the system. However, the second law of thermodynamics is not a defining relation for the entropy.
The term "thermal energy" is often used ambiguously in physics and engineering. [1] It can denote several different physical concepts, including: Internal energy: The energy contained within a body of matter or radiation, excluding the potential energy of the whole system, and excluding the kinetic energy of the system moving as a whole.
Systems do not contain work, but can perform work, and likewise, in formal thermodynamics, systems do not contain heat, but can transfer heat. Informally, however, a difference in the energy of a system that occurs solely because of a difference in its temperature is commonly called heat , and the energy that flows across a boundary as a result ...