Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Thermodynamic equilibrium is a notion of thermodynamics with axiomatic status referring to an internal state of a single thermodynamic system, or a relation between several thermodynamic systems connected by more or less permeable or impermeable walls.
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 word equilibrium implies a state of balance. Equilibrium thermodynamics, in origins, derives from analysis of the Carnot cycle. Here, typically a system, as cylinder of gas, initially in its own state of internal thermodynamic equilibrium, is set out of balance via heat input from a combustion reaction. Then, through a series of steps, as ...
[7]: 52 In other words, the set of all systems each in its own state of internal thermodynamic equilibrium may be divided into subsets in which every system belongs to one and only one subset, and is in thermal equilibrium with every other member of that subset, and is not in thermal equilibrium with a member of any other subset. This means ...
Thermodynamic equilibrium is characterized not only by the absence of any flow of mass or energy, but by “the absence of any tendency toward change on a macroscopic scale.” [2] Equilibrium thermodynamics, as a subject in physics, considers macroscopic bodies of matter and energy in states of internal thermodynamic equilibrium.
The revised statement of the first law postulates that a change in the internal energy of a system due to any arbitrary process, that takes the system from a given initial thermodynamic state to a given final equilibrium thermodynamic state, can be determined through the physical existence, for those given states, of a reference process that ...
For equilibrium thermodynamics, in a thermodynamic state of a system, its contents are in internal thermodynamic equilibrium, with zero flows of all quantities, both internal and between system and surroundings.
As time passes in an isolated system, internal differences of pressures, densities, and temperatures tend to even out. A system in which all equalizing processes have gone to completion is said to be in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. Once in thermodynamic equilibrium, a system's properties are, by definition, unchanging in time.