Laws of Thermodynamics - Second Law

Second Law

The second law of thermodynamics asserts the existence of a quantity called the entropy of a system and further states that

When two isolated systems in separate but nearby regions of space, each in thermodynamic equilibrium in itself (but not necessarily in equilibrium with each other at first) are at some time allowed to interact, breaking the isolation that separates the two systems, allowing them to exchange matter or energy, they will eventually reach a mutual thermodynamic equilibrium. The sum of the entropies of the initial, isolated systems is less than or equal to the entropy of the final combination of exchanging systems. In the process of reaching a new thermodynamic equilibrium, total entropy has increased, or at least has not decreased.

It follows that the entropy of an isolated macroscopic system never decreases. The second law states that spontaneous natural processes increase entropy overall, or in another formulation that heat can spontaneously be conducted or radiated only from a higher-temperature region to a lower-temperature region, but not the other way around.

The second law refers to a wide variety of processes, reversible and irreversible. Its main import is to tell about irreversibility.

The prime example of irreversibility is in the transfer of heat by conduction or radiation. It was known long before the discovery of the notion of entropy that when two bodies of different temperatures are connected with each other by purely thermal connection, conductive or radiative, then heat always flows from the hotter body to the colder one. This fact is part of the basic idea of heat, and is related also to the so-called zeroth law, though the textbooks' statements of the zeroth law are usually reticent about that, because they have been influenced by Carathéodory's basing his axiomatics on the law of conservation of energy and trying to make heat seem a theoretically derivative concept instead of an axiomatically accepted one. Šilahvý (1997) notes that Carathéodory's approach does not work for the description of irreversible processes that involve both heat conduction and conversion of kinetic energy into internal energy by viscosity (which is another prime example of irreversibility), because "the mechanical power and the rate of heating are not expressible as differential forms in the 'external parameters'".

The second law tells also about kinds of irreversibility other than heat transfer, and the notion of entropy is needed to provide that wider scope of the law.

According to the second law of thermodynamics, in a reversible heat transfer, an element of heat transferred, δQ, is the product of the temperature (T), both of the system and of the sources or destination of the heat, with the increment (dS) of the system's conjugate variable, its entropy (S)

The second law defines entropy, which may be viewed not only as a macroscopic variable of classical thermodynamics, but may also be viewed as a measure of deficiency of physical information about the microscopic details of the motion and configuration of the system, given only predictable experimental reproducibility of bulk or macroscopic behavior as specified by macroscopic variables that allow the distinction to be made between heat and work. More exactly, the law asserts that for two given macroscopically specified states of a system, there is a quantity called the difference of entropy between them. The entropy difference tells how much additional microscopic physical information is needed to specify one of the macroscopically specified states, given the macroscopic specification of the other, which is often a conveniently chosen reference state. It is often convenient to presuppose the reference state and not to explicitly state it. A final condition of a natural process always contains microscopically specifiable effects which are not fully and exactly predictable from the macroscopic specification of the initial condition of the process. This is why entropy increases in natural processes. The entropy increase tells how much extra microscopic information is needed to tell the final macroscopically specified state from the initial macroscopically specified state.