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TP2, Colombo Agustina
TP2, Colombo Agustina
The first statement of the 2nd law of thermodynamics - heat flows spontaneously from a
hot to a cold body - tells us that an ice cube must melt on a hot day, rather than becoming
colder.
The flow of heat through conduction occurs when fast (hot) atoms collide with slow (cool)
atoms, transferring some of their kinetic energy in the process. One might wonder why the
fast atoms don't collide with the cool ones and subsequently speed up, thereby gaining
kinetic energy as the cool ones lose kinetic energy - this would involve the spontaneous
transfer of heat from a cool object to a hot one, in violation of the 2nd law. The answer lies
in energy and momentum conservation in a collision - one can show, using these two
principles, that in a collision between two objects which conserves energy (called an elastic
collision ) the faster object slows down and the slower object speeds up.
A useful analogy in this regard is to think of heat flowing from hot to cold objects as
running “down hill”, which is what objects naturally do in Newtonian mechanics. It is
possible to make objects go up hill, but only by doing external work on them. This
movement of heat from a cool to a warm reservoir through some external work is the basis
of the following three devices.
In a refrigerator, the cool reservoir is the inside of the refrigerator, and the warm
reservoir is the room itself. From this, one can see that leaving a refrigerator door
open will not cool off the room that it is in.
In an air conditioner, the cool reservoir is the inside of a house, and the warm
reservoir is the outside. This is used to cool a house in the summer.
In a heat pump, the cool reservoir is the outside of a house, and the warm reservoir
is the inside. This can be used to warm a house in the winter. The heat pump is thus
just the reverse of an air conditioner, and indeed some heat pumps have a switch
which allows them to function as an air conditioner in the summer.
A practical refrigerator cycle uses a special liquid which, when the pressure is reduced,
evaporates to become a gas. Such a cycle is illustrated below.
CUADRO DE DICCIONARIO
1) ¿Quiénes escribieron este texto? ¿Pueden averiguar el año de
publicación?
Esta segunda ley fue publicada por Lord Kelvin y Ludwig Boltzmann en 1873
Vocabulario
Actividades
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