TABLE OF CONTENTS We are quite ignorant of the condition of energy in bodies generally. We know how much goes in, and how much comes out, and know whether at entrance or exit it is in the form of heat or of work. That
P.G.Tait, Sketch of Thermodynamics (1877)
The invention of the steam engine in the eighteenth century ushered in the Industrial Revolution. This revolution was made by practical engineers, most of whom, like Thomas Edison a century later, measured everything by the size of a silver dollar (or, since many of them were British, the size of a gold sovereign), and had little use for what Edison called the bulge-headed fraternity of the savanic (sic) world. However, Carnot [1] was an exception: He founded the science of thermodynamics in an attempt to find out if there is a fundamental limit to the efficiency with which heat can be converted into work. This search led to the discovery of the second law of thermodynamics, which does indeed impose such a limit, and he was able to enunciate the second law even before the first law was recognized.
A heat engine is any device that converts heat (usually generated by burning some fuel) into work. An idealized model of a heat engine is shown in Figure 15.1(a). While the figure is based on the steam engine, we shall see that the analysis can be applied to any heat engine;
