• Research Paper on:
    HEAT AND THERMODYNAMICS

    Number of Pages: 4

     

    Summary of the research paper:

    This 4-page paper provides an overview of thermodynamics and heat. Examples used are a power plant and car. Bibliography lists 3 sources.

    Name of Research Paper File: D0_MTthehea.rtf

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    Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
    it is a fairly straightforward and understandable one. In its most basic sense, thermodynamics relies on heat for energy - it is the conversion of heat into energy that leads  to thermodynamics. We know today that there is a difference between heat and temperature. But before the 19th century, no distinction between  these two was made (Lynds, 1995). At the time, it was believed that how hot or cold an object was could be determined by how much "heat" it contained, as  heat was considered a liquid that flowed from a hotter to a colder object (Lynds, 1995). The fluid was called a "caloric" (Lynds, 1995). This made some sense - it  also explained why ice would melt when water was placed on it. As the water was hotter than the ice (i.e., it had more heat), it only stood to reason  that the colder substance would dissolve under the "caloric." The caloric idea was abandoned in 1847 when J.P. Joule published a paper  demonstrating that heat was a form of energy, rather than a fluid (Lynds, 1995). Furthermore, thanks to experiments by Joule and others, it was determined that various forms of energy  (such as heat) could be transformed from one to another (Lynds, 1995). This knowledge ended up making the first law of what would become thermodynamics - namely when heat is  transformed into any other form of energy, or other forms of energy are transformed into heat, the total amount of energy (heat and other forms) remains constant (Lynds, 1995).  The second law of thermodynamics offers a different outlook on heat as energy, namely that no cyclic machine can convert heat energy wholly 

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