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In physics, potential energy is the energy held by an object because of its position relative to other objects, stresses within itself, its electric charge, or other factors. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] The term potential energy was introduced by the 19th-century Scottish engineer and physicist William Rankine , [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] although it has links to the ...
The phrase "chemical potential" sometimes means "total chemical potential", but that is not universal. [13] In some fields, in particular electrochemistry, semiconductor physics, and solid-state physics, the term "chemical potential" means internal chemical potential, while the term electrochemical potential is used to mean total chemical ...
Forms of energy include the kinetic energy of a moving object, the potential energy stored by an object (for instance due to its position in a field), the elastic energy stored in a solid object, chemical energy associated with chemical reactions, the radiant energy carried by electromagnetic radiation, the internal energy contained within a ...
Potential energy – energy possessed by a body by virtue of its position relative to others, stresses within itself, electric charge, and other factors. [3] [4] Elastic energy – energy of deformation of a material (or its container) exhibiting a restorative force; Gravitational energy – potential energy associated with a gravitational field.
For example, the working fluid in a steam engine sitting on top of Mount Everest has higher total energy due to gravity than it has at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, but the same thermodynamic potentials. This is because the gravitational potential energy belongs to the total energy rather than to thermodynamic potentials such as internal ...
In electrochemistry, the electrochemical potential of electrons (or any other species) is the total potential, including both the (internal, nonelectrical) chemical potential and the electric potential, and is by definition constant across a device in equilibrium, whereas the chemical potential of electrons is equal to the electrochemical ...
The potential has units of energy per mass, e.g., J/kg in the MKS system. By convention, it is always negative where it is defined, and as x tends to infinity, it approaches zero. The gravitational field, and thus the acceleration of a small body in the space around the massive object, is the negative gradient of the gravitational potential ...
The number of particles is, like volume and entropy, the displacement variable in a conjugate pair. The generalized force component of this pair is the chemical potential. The chemical potential may be thought of as a force which, when imbalanced, pushes an exchange of particles, either with the surroundings, or between phases inside the system.