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The other equation of state of an ideal gas must express Joule's second law, that the internal energy of a fixed mass of ideal gas is a function only of its temperature, with = (,). For the present purposes it is convenient to postulate an exemplary version of this law by writing:
According to the assumptions of the kinetic theory of ideal gases, one can consider that there are no intermolecular attractions between the molecules, or atoms, of an ideal gas. In other words, its potential energy is zero. Hence, all the energy possessed by the gas is the kinetic energy of the molecules, or atoms, of the gas.
The internal energy depends only on the internal state of the system and not on the particular choice from many possible processes by which energy may pass into or out of the system. It is a state variable, a thermodynamic potential, and an extensive property. [5] Thermodynamics defines internal energy macroscopically, for the body as a whole.
The above derivation uses the first and second laws of thermodynamics. 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.
Since the internal energy of the gas during Joule expansion is constant, cooling must be due to the conversion of internal kinetic energy to internal potential energy, with the opposite being the case for warming. Intermolecular forces are repulsive at short range and attractive at long range (for example, see the Lennard-Jones potential ...
For example, terrestrial air is primarily made up of diatomic gases (around 78% nitrogen, N 2, and 21% oxygen, O 2), and at standard conditions it can be considered to be an ideal gas. The above value of 1.4 is highly consistent with the measured adiabatic indices for dry air within a temperature range of 0–200 °C, exhibiting a deviation of ...
where W is work, U is internal energy, and Q is heat. [1] Pressure-volume work by the closed system is defined as: = where Δ means change over the whole process, whereas d denotes a differential. Since pressure is constant, this means that =. Applying the ideal gas law, this becomes
On the heels of this definition, that same year, the most famous version of the second law was read in a presentation at the Philosophical Society of Zurich on April 24, in which, in the end of his presentation, Clausius concludes: The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. This statement is the best-known phrasing of the second law.