Internal Energy of The Ideal Gas
Thermodynamics often uses the concept of the ideal gas for teaching purposes, and as an approximation for working systems. The ideal gas is a gas of particles considered as point objects that interact only by elastic collisions and fill a volume such that their free mean path between collisions is much larger than their diameter. Such systems are approximated by the monoatomic gases, helium and the other noble gases. Here the kinetic energy consists only of the translational energy of the individual atoms. Monoatomic particles are not considered to rotate or vibrate, and are not electronically excited to higher energies except at very high temperatures.
Therefore practical internal energy changes in an ideal gas may be described solely by changes in its kinetic energy.
Read more about this topic: Internal Energy
Famous quotes containing the words internal, energy, ideal and/or gas:
“We all run on two clocks. One is the outside clock, which ticks away our decades and brings us ceaselessly to the dry season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather and your own rate of living. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you see a dead man going through the motions of living.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)
“While the State becomes inflated and hypertrophied in order to obtain a firm enough grip upon individuals, but without succeeding, the latter, without mutual relationships, tumble over one another like so many liquid molecules, encountering no central energy to retain, fix and organize them.”
—Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)
“The whole point about the true unconscious is that it is all the time moving forward, beyond the range of its own fixed laws or habits. It is no good trying to superimpose an ideal nature upon the unconscious.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“... when I awake in the middle of the night, since I knew not where I was, I did not even know at first who I was; I only had in the first simplicity the feeling of existing as it must quiver in an animal.... I spent one second above the centuries of civilization, and the confused glimpse of the gas lamps, then of the shirts with turned-down collars, recomposed, little by little, the original lines of my self.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)