Work Done in Reversible and Irreversible Compression of an Ideal Gas
Requires a Wolfram Notebook System
Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.
This Demonstration compares the thermodynamic processes of reversible and irreversible isothermal compression of an ideal gas. The graph and image of a piston at the top represent the slow compression of a gas from some initial volume to some final volume . Reversible work is given by the integral , which equals the area shown in darker blue. By the usual thermodynamic convention, positive work means work done by the surroundings on the system. Since the process is isothermal, this equals the negative of the heat produced.
[more]
Contributed by: Blair Winograd (May 2015)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
Reference
[1] P. Atkins and L. Jones, Chemical Principles: The Quest for Insight, New York: W.H. Freeman, 1999.
Permanent Citation