Notes: Thermodynamics

Posts with the heading Notes:[subject] are more for my benefit than yours, just a little something to reinforce what I've already written down. There is only so much I can do to make dynamics a source of humour, for instance. But by all means read on, and I'll certainly do my best to spice things up a little.

Kicking things off with a bit of basic classical mechanics. This is the part that deals with the energy transfer of stuff on the macroscopic scale, that is to say, things we can measure easily enough in a lab. Key word in this area is systems.

A system has been defined for me as a collection of matter in a boundary, though truthfully I prefer Wikipedia's disambiguation page's suggestion "the portion of the physical universe chosen for analysis". It makes it sound like we are undertaking something fairly special, selecting a single part of the entire universe to study and observe, when in fact we are just considering energy transfer in engines and what not.

There are, generally speaking, 3 types of system; we have open systems, where matter can cross the boundary, closed systems, where matter cannot cross the boundary, and isolated systems, where both energy and matter are unable to be exchanged.

Generally speaking CT deals with systems in thermal equilibrium.

Extensive and Intensive properties

Extensive depends on amount of matter in a system
Intensive does not.

Well that was easy.