How is energy generated, how is it transformed from one form to another, and what happens to energy in a closed system? The laws of thermodynamics will help answer all these questions. The second law of thermodynamics will be considered in more detail today.
Laws in everyday life
Laws govern daily life. The road laws say you need to stop at the stop signs. Government demands to provide part of their salaries to the state and the federal government. Even scientific ones are applicable to everyday life. For example, the law of gravity predicts a pretty bad result for those trying to fly. Another set of scientific laws that affect everyday life are the laws of thermodynamics. So, you can give a number of examples to see how they affect everyday life.
The first law of thermodynamics
The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it can be transformed from one form to another. It is also sometimes called the law of conservation of energy. So how does this relate to everyday life? Well, take, for example, the computer you are using now. It is powered by energy, but where does this energy come from? The first law of thermodynamics tells us that this energy could not appear from under the air, so it came from somewhere.
You can track this energy. The computer is powered by electricity, but where does the electricity come from? Right, from a power plant or hydroelectric power station. If we consider the second, it will be connected with a dam that holds back the river. The river has a connection with kinetic energy, which means that the river flows. The dam turns this kinetic energy into potential energy.
How does a hydroelectric power station work? Water is used to rotate the turbine. When the turbine rotates, a generator is driven that will generate electricity. This electricity can be laid entirely in wires from the power station to your home, so that when the power cord is connected to an electrical outlet, electricity will penetrate your computer so that it can work.
What happened here? There was already a certain amount of energy that was connected with the water in the river as kinetic energy. Then it turned into potential energy. Then the dam took this potential energy and turned it into electricity, which then could get into your home and power the computer.
The second law of thermodynamics
Having studied this law, you can understand how energy works and why everything is moving towards possible chaos and disorder. The second law of thermodynamics is also called the law of entropy. Have you ever wondered how the universe came about? According to the Big Bang Theory, a huge amount of energy came together before everything was born. After the Big Bang, the Universe appeared. All this is good, just what energy was it? At the beginning of time, all the energy in the universe was contained in one relatively small place. This intense concentration was a huge amount of what is called potential energy. Over time, it spread throughout the vast space of our universe.
On a much smaller scale, the reservoir of water held by the dam contains potential energy, since its location makes it possible to flow through the dam. In each case, the stored energy, once released, spreads and does so without any effort. In other words, the release of potential energy is a spontaneous process that occurs without the need for additional resources. As the energy spreads, part of it is converted into useful energy and does a certain job. The rest is converted to unusable, simply called heat.
As the universe continues to spread, it contains less and less useful energy. If less useful is available, less work can be done. Since water flows through the dam, it also contains less useful energy. This decrease in usable energy over time is called entropy, where entropy is the amount of unused energy in the system, and the system is just a collection of objects that make up the whole.
Entropy can also be referred to as the number of accidents or chaos in an organization without an organization. As useful energy decreases over time, disorganization and chaos increase. Thus, as the accumulated potential energy is released, not all of this is converted into useful energy. All systems experience this increase in entropy over time. This is very important to understand, and this phenomenon is called the second law of thermodynamics.
Entropy: Accident or Defect
As you may have guessed, the second law follows the first, which is usually called the law of conservation of energy, and it states that energy cannot be created and cannot be destroyed. In other words, the amount of energy in the Universe or any system is constant. The second law of thermodynamics is usually called the law of entropy, and he believes that over time, energy becomes less useful, and its quality decreases with time. Entropy is the degree of randomness or defects that a system has. If the system is very disordered, then it has great entropy. If the system has a lot of malfunctions, then the entropy is low.
In simple words, the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of a system cannot decrease over time. This means that in nature, things move from a state of order to a state of disorder. And it is irreversible. A system will never become more ordered by itself. In other words, in nature, the entropy of a system always increases. One way to think about it is your home. If you never clean and vacuum it, then pretty soon you will have a terrible mess. Entropy has increased! To reduce it, it is necessary to use energy to use a vacuum cleaner and a mop to clean the surface of dust. The house will not clean itself.
What is the second law of thermodynamics? The statement in simple words says that when energy changes from one form to another form, matter either moves freely, or entropy (disorder) in a closed system increases. Differences in temperature, pressure and density tend to align horizontally after a while. Due to gravity, density and pressure do not align vertically. Density and pressure at the bottom will be greater than from above. Entropy is a measure of the distribution of matter and energy wherever it has access. The most common formulation of the second law of thermodynamics is mainly related to Rudolf Clausius, who said:
It is impossible to build a device that does not produce a different effect than the transfer of heat from a body with a lower temperature to a body with a higher temperature.
In other words, everyone is trying to maintain the same temperature over time. There are many formulations of the second law of thermodynamics that use different terms, but they all mean the same thing. Another Clausius statement:
Heat in itself does not occur from a cold to a hotter body.
The second law applies only to large systems. It concerns the probable behavior of a system in which there is no energy or matter. The larger the system, the more likely the second law.
Another wording of the law:
Total entropy always increases in a spontaneous process.
The increase in the entropy ΔS during the process should exceed or be equal to the ratio of the amount of heat Q transferred to the system to the temperature T at which the heat is transferred. The formula of the second law of thermodynamics:
Thermodynamic system
In a general sense, the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics in simple words says that temperature differences between systems in contact with each other tend to equalize and that work can be obtained from these nonequilibrium differences. But at the same time there is a loss of thermal energy, and entropy increases. Differences in pressure, density and temperature in an isolated system tend to equalize when given the opportunity; density and pressure, but not temperature, depend on gravity. A heat engine is a mechanical device that provides useful work due to the difference in temperature between the two bodies.
A thermodynamic system is one that interacts and exchanges energy with the area around it. Exchange and transfer must occur in at least two ways. One way should be heat transfer. If the thermodynamic system is “in equilibrium”, it cannot change its state or status without interacting with the environment. Simply put, if you are in balance, you are a “happy system”, you cannot do anything. If you want to do something, you must interact with the outside world.
The second law of thermodynamics: the irreversibility of processes
It is impossible to have a cyclic (repeating) process that completely converts heat into work. It is also impossible to have a process that transfers heat from cold objects to warm objects without using work. A certain amount of energy in the reaction is always lost for heating. In addition, the system cannot convert all of its energy into working energy. The second part of the law is more obvious.
A cold body cannot heat a warm body. Heat naturally tends to flow from warmer to cooler areas. If heat shifts from cooler to warmer, this is contrary to what is “natural,” so the system must do some work for this to happen. Irreversibility of processes in nature is the second law of thermodynamics. This is perhaps the most famous (at least among scientists) and important law of all science. One of its formulations:
The entropy of the universe tends to the maximum.
In other words, the entropy either remains unchanged or becomes larger, the entropy of the Universe can never decrease. The problem is that this is always true. If you take a bottle of perfume and spray it in the room, then soon the fragrant atoms will fill the entire space, and this process is irreversible.
Relations in thermodynamics
The laws of thermodynamics describe the relationship between thermal energy or heat and other forms of energy, and how energy affects matter. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed; the total amount of energy in the universe remains unchanged. The second law of thermodynamics is devoted to the quality of energy. It says that as energy is transferred or converted, useful energy is lost more and more. The second law also states that there is a natural tendency to transform any isolated system into a more disordered state.
Even when the order increases in a certain place, when you take into account the whole system, including the environment, there is always an increase in entropy. In another example, crystals may form from a salt solution when water is evaporated. Crystals are more ordered than salt molecules in solution; however, evaporated water is much more erratic than liquid water. The whole process leads to a net increase in disorder.
Work and energy
The second law explains that it is impossible to convert thermal energy into mechanical energy with 100 percent efficiency. You can give an example with a car. After the gas heating process, in order to increase its pressure to drive the piston, a certain amount of heat always remains in the gas, which cannot be used for any additional work. This waste heat must be discarded by transferring it to the radiator. In the case of a car engine, this is done by extracting the spent fuel and air mixture into the atmosphere.
In addition, any device with moving parts creates friction, which converts mechanical energy into heat, which is usually unsuitable and must be removed from the system by transferring it to a radiator. When a hot and cold body contacts each other, thermal energy will flow from the hot body to the cold body until they reach thermal equilibrium. However, heat will never return to the other side; the temperature difference between the two bodies will never increase spontaneously. Moving heat from a cold body to a hot body requires work that an external energy source, such as a heat pump, must perform.
Fate of the universe
The second law also predicts the end of the universe. This is the final level of disorder, if there is constant thermal equilibrium everywhere, no work can be done, and all energy will end as a random movement of atoms and molecules. According to modern data, the Metagalaxy is an expanding non-stationary system, there can be no question of the thermal death of the Universe. Thermal death is a state of thermal equilibrium in which all processes cease.
This position is erroneous, since the second law of thermodynamics applies only to closed systems. And the Universe, as you know, is limitless. However, the term “thermal death of the Universe” itself is sometimes used to refer to the scenario of the future development of the Universe, according to which it will continue to expand indefinitely into the darkness of space until it turns into diffused cold dust.