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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.
German physicist and mathematician Rudolf Clausius restated Carnot's principle known as the ... In macroscopic thermodynamics, the second law is a basic observation ...
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.
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.
Constantin Carathéodory formulated thermodynamics on a purely mathematical axiomatic foundation. His statement of the second law is known as the Principle of Carathéodory, which may be formulated as follows: [48] In every neighborhood of any state S of an adiabatically enclosed system there are states inaccessible from S. [49]
Thermodynamics is expressed by a mathematical framework of thermodynamic equations which relate various thermodynamic quantities and physical properties measured in a laboratory or production process. Thermodynamics is based on a fundamental set of postulates, that became the laws of thermodynamics.
Researchers have made a breakthrough in applying the first law of thermodynamics to complex systems, rewriting the way we understand complex energetic systems.
For quasi-static and reversible processes, the first law of thermodynamics is: d U = δ Q − δ W {\displaystyle dU=\delta Q-\delta W} where δQ is the heat supplied to the system and δW is the work done by the system.