Prof. Jason Zimba ’91 – Bennington College
“Go Pistons!”
In thermodynamics courses, we spend the vast majority of our instructional time talking about slow, reversible processes. But couldn’t we also learn a few things by thinking in a general way about very fast processes? In this talk, we’ll look at rapid “cycles” of expansion-compression in an ideal gas, where rapidity means that the walls of the container move at speeds large compared to the typical particle speed. One outcome of this investigation will be an estimate of the amount of entropy created in such a process.
We’ll also look at a quantum-mechanical analogue system, namely a harmonic oscillator whose spring constant varies in time, from tight to loose and back to tight again. This time we’ll be able to show some results for entropy creation across a few orders of magnitude in the timescale of the process.