On page 37 of Sommerfeld's Vol. V, someone writes, "Work can be regarded
as being equivalent to heat at an infinitely high temperature." Isn't
this the same as not contributing to the entropy balance, since (del Q) /
T ---> 0 as T --> inf. ?
Am I not vindicated in my claim that heat and work (resp.) could be
distinguished by contributing to or not contributing to (resp.) the
entropy balance?
Regards / Tom
P.S. I must study Mallinckrodt and Leff more thoroughly to distinguish
where we agree and where and how we differ. Which of the seven forms of
work fail this definition? And what do *I* call them? I need to do this
for Reynolds and Perkins, *Engineering Thermodynamics*, too, who also
define work as massless energy transfer that does not affect the entropy
balance. But, they have some different names for things. I think
their definition of *availability* is just about Szargut's *exergy*.
This exercise is called syncretism, is it not? It's not a case of one
guy is right and the other wrong. We just need to make a list of what
each of us calls various things. The translation will be painless,
then, and one can use the approach that minimizes the computation
depending on what we need to know.
Jumping off the page at me is the case of the free expansion of an
(ideal) gas (into a vacuum). This is completely irreversible such that
we can compute precisely the entropy created. The gas could have pushed
a frictionless piston. So, supposing an ideal gas, we can find the lost
work and the increase of entropy and everything else pretty easily and no
work is done in my lingo, but M & L call it pseudo-work, which will turn
out to be one of the lost works. I need to figure out which. Etc. I
can't do it today, though. Today is committed.