HEAT AND TEMPERATURE

Heat and Temperature

Heat and Temperature

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to answer fundamental questions related to heat and temperature. The answers to the questions will seek to provide basic information about the properties and relationships and sources of heat and temperature.

Discussion

Question 1: What is Heat?

The heat is the amount of energy a body transferred to another because of a temperature difference between the two. The energy put into play in the phenomenon called thermal energy heating. The character of heat energy carries with it the possibility of transforming it into mechanical work. However, nature imposes some limitations to the conversion, which makes only a fraction of the available heat is recoverable in the form of productive work.

Ideas about the nature of heat have changed markedly over the past two centuries. The theory of caloric or fluid faint located in the pores or interstices of matter going from hot bodies, in which supposedly was in greater numbers, to frozen bodies, had occupied a prominent place in physics since the time of Greek philosophers. However, having reached the end of the eighteenth century its heyday, it was losing credibility by not being able to explain the results of experiments that scientists such as Benjamin Thomson (1753-1814) and Humphrey Davy (1778-1829) performed (Maxwell, 2002).

Question 2: What is Temperature?

The scientific concepts of heat and temperature based on the intuitive idea, conveys your own body. Thus, the physiological sensation revealed by touch, allowing allocation of hot and frozen bodies, leads to the idea of ??temperature and by an extension to the heat. However, physics beyond these intuitive notions and look for representations, which can be expressed in numerical form, like measurable variables or attributes.

Experience shows that when two bodies, one cold and one hot, get in touch for a long time, eventually reaching a state of balance between the two called thermal equilibrium. In the state, it is not possible to distinguish, which of the two is more. The property they have in common the bodies are in thermal equilibrium is precisely the temperature. Along with this, descriptive definition of what meant in physical temperature, habitually using a different definition of operational, which indicates the procedure or operation determined that magnitude. According to this criterion would be to measure temperature thermometers (Chang, 2004).

Study of Heat Relate to the Kinetic Theory of Matter

The development of a kinetic theory of matter made based on those old ideas that Thompson concerned with the successive contributions of scientists such as Clausius (1822-1888), Maxwell (1831-1879), Boltzmann (1844 - 1906) and Gibbs (1839-1903) and provided an explanation for the notion of temperature and other key concepts for understanding the heating phenomena.

Kinetic-molecular theory of the matter is so named because it acknowledges that the different particles, atoms and molecules, which are the substances, are in constant motion (kinesis means movement in Greek). In the solid movement is vibrating around fixed points or equilibrium. In liquids, such as an intermediate state, there may be two types of molecular ...