Ideal gas processes – and two ideal gas case studies too

Abstract

Abstract This chapter brings together, and builds on, the results from previous chapters to provide a succinct, and comprehensive, summary of all key relationships relating to ideal gases, including the heat and work associated with isothermal, adiabatic, isochoric and isobaric changes, and the properties of an ideal gas’s heat capacities at constant volume and constant pressure. The chapter also has two ‘case studies’ which use the ideal gas equations in broader, and more real, contexts, so showing how the equations can be used to tackle, successfully, more extensive systems. The first ‘case study’ is the Carnot cycle, and so covers all the fundamentals required for the proof of the existence of entropy as a state function; the second ‘case study’ is the ‘thermodynamic pendulum’ – a system in which a piston in an enclosed cylinder oscillates to and fro like a pendulum under gravity, in both the absence, and presence, of friction.