Subscribe to our newsletter. Figure 3 - The expression for average kinetic energy.
N represents the number of particles.
According to the theory, there should be a standard deviation to go along with this average, but I have yet to see a thermometer that gives standard deviation. When one considers temperature in mixtures of different kinds of molecules or systems that are not at equilibrium, at the nanoscale there should be localized regions of various temperatures contributing to this average. Temperature distribution is frequently calculated in non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulations. In these theoretical models, the kinetic energy of each particle at various points in time is taken into account in order to provide a better understanding of molecular scale events. While this is still a statistical method, it allows discrete statements to be made about localized parts of a system.