Démocrite et la puissance motrice du feu (Democritus and the motive power of fire)
Résumé
This paper, whose purpose is mainly historical and pedagogical, suggests that concepts introduced in the ancient Greece by Anaximander (isolated flat earth) and Democritus (corpuscles and empty-space) could have led, from some observations and plausible generalizations, to the maximum efficiency and output work of heat engines obtained in the modern time by Carnot (1824). A prolog presents a simple heat engine. After introducing the concept of thermal equilibrium, a model of thermal engine consisting of corpuscle reservoirs is studied in a classical manner. We establish the ideal gas law from the Daniel Bernoulli corpuscular concept (1738) using the corpuscle \emph{action} concept. This leads to the energy of a gas at any temperature.
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)