9.3 The Heat Engine

The main organs of a heat engine are as follows:

  1. A source at high temperature.
  2. A sink or refrigerator at lower temperature.
  3. The working substance. The heat of the source, instead of flowing directly from the source to the sink, passes through the medium of the working substance producing certain changes of the thermodynamic state of the substance.

From the change of the thermodynamic coordinates, the work done by the substance is obtained from the relation image where v1 and v2 are the initial and final volumes of the working substance, before and after the changes respectively. The balance of heat drawn from the source which is ...

Get Heat and Thermodynamics now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial