🎯 Knowledge Check
Physics — THERMODYNAMICS
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Frequently Asked Questions
Thermodynamics is the branch of physics that deals with heat, work, energy, and the laws governing their interconversion in macroscopic systems.
A thermodynamic system is a specified quantity of matter or a region of space chosen for study, separated from its surroundings by a real or imaginary boundary.
The surroundings include everything outside the thermodynamic system that can interact with it by exchanging heat or work.
The thermodynamic state of a system is its condition described completely by state variables such as pressure, volume, and temperature.
State variables are physical quantities whose values depend only on the current state of the system and not on the path followed.
Pressure, volume, temperature, internal energy, entropy, and enthalpy are state variables.
Path variables are quantities whose values depend on the path taken during a process, such as heat and work.
A system is in thermodynamic equilibrium when it is simultaneously in thermal, mechanical, and chemical equilibrium.
An equation of state is a mathematical relation connecting state variables of a system in equilibrium, such as \(PV = nRT\).
An ideal gas is a hypothetical gas whose molecules do not interact except during elastic collisions and obey the ideal gas equation exactly.
The ideal gas equation is \(PV = nRT\), where symbols have their usual meanings.
Internal energy is the total microscopic energy of a system arising from molecular motion and interactions.
The internal energy of an ideal gas depends only on temperature.
The first law states that heat supplied to a system equals the increase in internal energy plus work done by the system.
\(\Delta Q = \Delta U + W\).