Laws of thermodynamics


The laws of thermodynamics define physical quantities, such as temperature, energy, and entropy, that characterize thermodynamic systems at thermodynamic equilibrium. The laws describe the relationships between these quantities, and form a basis of precluding the possibility of certain phenomena, such as perpetual motion. In addition to their use in thermodynamics, they are important fundamental laws of physics in general, and are applicable in other natural sciences.
Thermodynamics has traditionally recognized three fundamental laws, simply named by an ordinal identification, the first law, the second law, and the third law.. In addition, after the first three laws were established, it was recognized that another law, more fundamental to all three, could be stated, which was named the zeroth law.
The zeroth law of thermodynamics defines thermal equilibrium and forms a basis for the definition of temperature: If two systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third system, they are in thermal equilibrium with each other.
The first law of thermodynamics: When energy passes into or out of a system, the system's internal energy changes in accord with the law of conservation of energy. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the first kind are impossible.
The second law of thermodynamics: In a natural thermodynamic process, the sum of the entropies of the interacting thermodynamic systems increases. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the second kind are impossible.
The third law of thermodynamics: The entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches absolute zero. With the exception of non-crystalline solids the entropy of a system at absolute zero is typically close to zero.
Additional laws have been suggested, but none of them achieved the generality of the four accepted laws, and are not discussed in standard textbooks.

Zeroth law

The zeroth law of thermodynamics may be stated in the following form:
The law is intended to allow the existence of an empirical parameter, the temperature, as a property of a system such that systems in thermal equilibrium with each other have the same temperature. The law as stated here is compatible with the use of a particular physical body, for example a mass of gas, to match temperatures of other bodies, but does not justify regarding temperature as a quantity that can be measured on a scale of real numbers.
Though this version of the law is one of the most commonly stated versions, it is only one of a diversity of statements that are labeled as "the zeroth law" by competent writers. Some statements go further so as to supply the important physical fact that temperature is one-dimensional and that one can conceptually arrange bodies in real number sequence from colder to hotter. Perhaps there exists no unique "best possible statement" of the "zeroth law", because there is in the literature a range of formulations of the principles of thermodynamics, each of which call for their respectively appropriate versions of the law.
Although these concepts of temperature and of thermal equilibrium are fundamental to thermodynamics and were clearly stated in the nineteenth century, the desire to explicitly number the above law was not widely felt until Fowler and Guggenheim did so in the 1930s, long after the first, second, and third law were already widely understood and recognized. Hence it was numbered the zeroth law. The importance of the law as a foundation to the earlier laws is that it allows the definition of temperature in a non-circular way without reference to entropy, its conjugate variable. Such a temperature definition is said to be 'empirical'.

First law

The first law of thermodynamics is a version of the law of conservation of energy, adapted for thermodynamic systems.
The law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of an isolated system is constant; energy can be transformed from one form to another, but can be neither created nor destroyed.
For a thermodynamic process without transfer of matter, the first law is often formulated
where denotes the change in the internal energy of a closed system, denotes the quantity of energy supplied to the system as heat, and denotes the amount of thermodynamic work done by the system on its surroundings.
In the case of a two-stage thermodynamic cycle of a closed system, which returns to its original state, the heat supplied to the system in one stage of the cycle, minus the heat removed from it in the other stage, plus the thermodynamic work added to the system,, equals the thermodynamic work that leaves the system.
hence, for a full cycle,
For the particular case of a thermally isolated system, the change of the internal energy of an adiabatically isolated system can only be the result of the work added to the system, because the adiabatic assumption is:.
For processes that include transfer of matter, a further statement is needed: 'With due account of the respective fiducial reference states of the systems, when two systems, which may be of different chemical compositions, initially separated only by an impermeable wall, and otherwise isolated, are combined into a new system by the thermodynamic operation of removal of the wall, then
where denotes the internal energy of the combined system, and and denote the internal energies of the respective separated systems.'
The First Law encompasses several principles:
where denotes the amount of energy transferred into the system as heat.
Combining these principles leads to one traditional statement of the first law of thermodynamics: it is not possible to construct a machine which will perpetually output work without an equal amount of energy input to that machine. Or more briefly, a perpetual motion machine of the first kind is impossible.

Second law

The second law of thermodynamics indicates the irreversibility of natural processes, and, in many cases, the tendency of natural processes to lead towards spatial homogeneity of matter and energy, and especially of temperature. It can be formulated in a variety of interesting and important ways.
It implies the existence of a quantity called the entropy of a thermodynamic system. In terms of this quantity it implies that
The second law is applicable to a wide variety of processes, reversible and irreversible. All natural processes are irreversible. Reversible processes are a useful and convenient theoretical limiting case, but do not occur in nature.
A prime example of irreversibility is in the transfer of heat by conduction or radiation. It was known long before the discovery of the notion of entropy that when two bodies initially of different temperatures come into thermal connection, then heat always flows from the hotter body to the colder one.
The second law tells also about kinds of irreversibility other than heat transfer, for example those of friction and viscosity, and those of chemical reactions. The notion of entropy is needed to provide that wider scope of the law.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, in a theoretical and fictive reversible heat transfer, an element of heat transferred, δQ, is the product of the temperature, both of the system and of the sources or destination of the heat, with the increment of the system's conjugate variable, its entropy
Entropy may also be viewed as a physical measure of the lack of physical information about the microscopic details of the motion and configuration of a system, when only the macroscopic states are known. This lack of information is often described as disorder on a microscopic or molecular scale. The law asserts that for two given macroscopically specified states of a system, there is a quantity called the difference of information entropy between them. This information entropy difference defines how much additional microscopic physical information is needed to specify one of the macroscopically specified states, given the macroscopic specification of the other – often a conveniently chosen reference state which may be presupposed to exist rather than explicitly stated. A final condition of a natural process always contains microscopically specifiable effects which are not fully and exactly predictable from the macroscopic specification of the initial condition of the process. This is why entropy increases in natural processes – the increase tells how much extra microscopic information is needed to distinguish the final macroscopically specified state from the initial macroscopically specified state.

Third law

The third law of thermodynamics is sometimes stated as follows:
At zero temperature the system must be in a state with the minimum thermal energy. This statement holds true if the perfect crystal has only one state with minimum energy. Entropy is related to the number of possible microstates according to:
Where S is the entropy of the system, kB Boltzmann's constant, and Ω the number of microstates. At absolute zero there is only 1 microstate possible and ln = 0.
A more general form of the third law that applies to a system such as a glass that may have more than one minimum microscopically distinct energy state, or may have a microscopically distinct state that is "frozen in" though not a strictly minimum energy state and not strictly speaking a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, at absolute zero temperature:
The constant value is called the residual entropy of the system.

History

showed that endless mechanical action can generate indefinitely large amounts of heat from a fixed amount of working substance thus challenging the caloric theory of heat, which held that there would be a finite amount of caloric heat/energy in a fixed amount of working substance. The first established thermodynamic principle, which eventually became the second law of thermodynamics, was formulated by Sadi Carnot in 1824. By 1860, as formalized in the works of those such as Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson, two established principles of thermodynamics had evolved, the first principle and the second principle, later restated as thermodynamic laws. By 1873, for example, thermodynamicist Josiah Willard Gibbs, in his memoir Graphical Methods in the Thermodynamics of Fluids, clearly stated the first two absolute laws of thermodynamics. Some textbooks throughout the 20th century have numbered the laws differently. In some fields removed from chemistry, the second law was considered to deal with the efficiency of heat engines only, whereas what was called the third law dealt with entropy increases. Directly defining zero points for entropy calculations was not considered to be a law. Gradually, this separation was combined into the second law and the modern third law was widely adopted.