A Commentary on Thermodynamics
By: by William Alan Day
Series: Springer Tracts in Natural Philosophy -- 32; Springer tracts in natural philosophy -- 32.
Publisher: Springer New York
Published: 1988
Place of publication: New York, NY
Language: eng
Format: [electronic resource] /
Number of pages: 96
ISBN-13: 9781461264347; 9781441985507
Subjects: Physics
Description: The aim of this book is to comment on, and clarify, the mathematical aspects of the theory of thermodynamics. The standard presentations of the subject are often beset by a number of obscurities associated with the words "state", "reversible", "irreversible", and "quasi-static". This book is written in the belief that such obscurities are best removed not by the formal axiomatization of thermodynamics, but by setting the theory in the wider context of a genuine field theory which incorporates the effects of heat conduction and intertia, and proving appropriate results about the governing differential equations of this field theory. Even in the simplest one-dimensional case it is a nontrivial task to carry through the details of this program, and many challenging problems remain open.
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Table of contents: title: Contents: Nonlinear Thermoelasticity; title: Simplification and Approximation; title: Efficiency Within Nonlinear Thermoelasticity; title: Efficiency Within Homogeneous and Dissipationless Thermoelasticity; title: Efficiency Within Linearized Thermoelasticity; title: Versions of a Second Law of Thermodynamics; title: References; title: Index.