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Re: adiabatic processes



At 11:30 AM 1/7/00 -0500, Chuck Britton wrote:

we used the word 'adiabatic' to describe a PROCESS not a 'wall'.

Right!

A good illustration of this is ye olde cylinder of gas with piston. If you
pull out the piston too quickly, the process would be better described
using the sudden approximation than the adiabatic approximation. At the
other extreme, if you pull out the piston out too slowly, you need to worry
about thermal conduction and all sorts of other non-adiabatic
processes. But if you do it baby-bear-just-right, the adiabatic
approximation may be a very useful description.

Also note that nothing is *exactly* adiabatic -- but it is still
appropriate to use terms like "adiabatic process" to describe ideal
processes, and to describe real-world processes that are adiabatic to a
good approximation.