Clausius statement of second law of thermodynamics

In the case of a car engine, this is done by exhausting the spent fuel and air mixture to the atmosphere. This waste heat must be discarded by transferring it to a heat sink. After the process of heating a gas to increase its pressure to drive a piston, there is always some leftover heat in the gas that cannot be used to do any additional work. One thing the Second Law explains is that it is impossible to convert heat energy to mechanical energy with 100 percent efficiency. This has often been summarized as, вЂњYou canвЂ™t unscramble an egg.вЂќ According to Wolfram, Boltzmann realized around 1876 that the reason for this is that there must be many more disordered states for a system than there are ordered states therefore random interactions will inevitably lead to greater disorder. However, the warm gas will never spontaneously separate itself into hot and cold gas, meaning that the process of mixing hot and cold gasses is irreversible.

The result of this is that when hot gas and cold gas are placed together in a container, you eventually end up with warm gas. This approach also led to the conclusion that while collisions between individual molecules are completely reversible, i.e., they work the same when played forward or backward, for a large quantity of gas, the speeds of individual molecules tend over time to form a normal or Gaussian distribution, sometimes depicted as a вЂњbell curve,вЂќ around the average speed. The process taken as a whole results in a net increase in disorder. Crystals are more orderly than salt molecules in solution however, vaporized water is much more disorderly than liquid water. In another example, crystals can form from a salt solution as the water is evaporated. Even when order is increased in a specific location, for example by the self-assembly of molecules to form a living organism, when you take the entire system including the environment into account, there is always a net increase in entropy. Mitra explained that all processes result in an increase in entropy. 'At a very microscopic level, it simply says that if you have a system that is isolated, any natural process in that system progresses in the direction of increasing disorder, or entropy, of the system.вЂќ вЂњThere are a number of ways to state the Second Law,' he said. Saibal Mitra, a professor of physics at Missouri State University, finds the Second Law to be the most interesting of the four laws of thermodynamics.

Clausius statement of second law of thermodynamics