Physics Conceptual Questions Chapter 15
Which do you thinks the greater entropy, 1 kg of solid iron or 1 kg of liquid iron? Why?
Liquid Iron The liquid iron has more entropy. Solids are very arranged crystalline structures. Liquids are much more disordered by comparison. Also, solids must be heated to turn them into liquids.
Think up several processes (other than those already mentioned) that would obey the first law of thermodynamics, but, if they actually occurred, would violate the second law.
(a) An empty perfume bottle is placed in a room containing perfume molecules, and all of the perfume molecules move into the bottle from various directions at the same time. (b) Water on the sidewalk coalesces into droplets, are propelled upward, and rise into the air. (c) Popcorn is placed in the refrigerator, and it "unpops", changing backed into uncooked kernels. (d) A house got warmer in the winter while the outdoors got colder, due to heat moving from the outdoors to inside the house.
In an isothermal process, 3700 J of work is done by an ideal gas. Is this enough information to tell how much heat has been added to the system? If so, how much? If not, why not?
3700 J Enters System The internal energy of a gas only depends on the temperature.
A gas is allowed to expand (a) adiabatically and (b) isothermally. In each process, does the entropy increase, decrease, or stay the same? Explain.
Entropy Doesn't Change, Entropy Increases The adiabatic process is does not change the entropy. The isothermal expansion requires heat flow to compensate for the work done by the gas, so the entropy increases.
Can you warm a kitchen in winter by leaving the oven door open? Can you cool the kitchen on a hot summer day by leaving the refrigerator door open? Explain.
It is possible to warm the kitchen in the winter by having the oven door open. The oven heating elements radiate heat energy into the oven cavity, and if the oven door is open, the oven is just heating a bigger volume than usual. However, you cannot cool the kitchen by having the refrigerator door open. The refrigerator exhausts more heat than it removes from the refrigerated volume, so the room actually gets warmer with the refrigerator door open. If you could have the refrigerator exhaust into some other room, then the refrigerator would be similar to an air conditioner, and it could cool the kitchen, while heating up some other space.
Can mechanical energy ever be transformed completely into heat or internal energy? Can the reverse happen? In each case, if your answer is no, explain why not; if yes, give one or two examples.
Mechanical energy can be transformed completely into heat. As a moving object slides across a rough level floor and eventually stops, the mechanical energy of the moving object has been transformed completely into heat. Also, if a moving object were to be used to compress a frictionless piston containing an insulated gas, the kinetic energy of the object would become internal energy of the gas. A gas that expands adiabatically (without heat transfer) transforms internal energy into mechanical energy, by doing work on its surroundings at the expense of its internal energy. Of course, that is an ideal (reversible) process.
The oceans contain a tremendous amount of thermal (internal) energy. Why, in general, is it not possible to put this energy to useful work?
To utilize the thermal energy in the ocean waters, a heat engine would need to be developed that operated between two different temperatures. If surface temperature water was to be both the source and the exhaust, then no work could be extracted. If the temperature difference between surface and deep ocean waters were to be used, there would be considerable engineering obstacles, high expense, and potential environmental difficulties involved in having a heat engine that connected surface water and deep ocean water. Likewise, if the difference in temperature between tropical water and arctic or Antarctic water were to be used, the same type of major difficulties would be involved because of the large distances involved.
Suppose a lot of papers are strewn all over the floor; then you stack them neatly. Does this violate the second law of thermodynamics? Explain.
While the state of the papers has gone from disorder to order, they did not do so spontaneously. An outside source (you) caused the increase in order. You had to provide energy to do this (through your metabolic processes), and in doing so, your entropy increased more than the entropy of the papers decreased. The overall effect is that the entropy of the universe increased, satisfying the second law of thermodynamics.
a) What happens if you remove the lid of a bottle containing chlorine gas? b) Does the reverse process ever happen? Why or why not? c) Can you think of two other examples of irreversibility?
a) If the lid is removed from a bottle of chlorine gas, the gas molecules will diffuse out of the mouth of the bottle, and eventually spread out uniformly in whatever volume to which they are confined. b) The reverse process, that of individual chlorine gas molecules in a closed volume spontaneously entering a small volume, never happens. The probability of the gas molecules all entering the bottle is infinitesimal compared to the probability of the gas molecules being uniformly spread throughout the room. The reverse process would require a spontaneous decrease in entropy. c) Some other examples of irreversibility: the shuffling of an ordered deck of cards; the diffusion of dye in a liquid; the toppling of buildings during an earthquake.
What are the high-temperature and the low-temperature areas for a) an internal combustion engine, and b) a steam engine? Are they, strictly speaking, heat reservoirs?
a) In an internal combustion engine, the high temperature reservoir is the ignited gas-air mixture. The low temperature reservoir is the gases exhausted from the cylinder into the atmosphere. b) In a steam engine, the high temperature reservoir is the heated, high-pressure steam from the boiler. The low temperature reservoir is the low-pressure steam from the exhaust.