Nicolas
Léonard Sadi Carnot (1
June 1796 – 24 August 1832) was a French military engineer and physicist, often
described as the "father of thermodynamics". In his only publication,
the 1824 monograph Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, Carnot gave
the first successful theory of the maximum efficiency of heat engines. Carnot's
work attracted little attention during his lifetime, but it was later used by Rudolf Clausius and Lord
Kelvin to formalize the second law of thermodynamics and define the concept of
entropy.
Sadi Carnot at age 17
Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire
Background
When Carnot began working on his
book, steam engines had achieved widely recognized economic and industrial
importance, but there had been no real scientific study of them. Newcomen had
invented the first piston-operated steam engine over a century before, in 1712;
some 50 years after that, James Watt made his celebrated improvements, which
were responsible for greatly increasing the efficiency and practicality of
steam engines. Compound engines (engines with more than one stage of expansion)
had already been invented, and there was even a crude form of
internal-combustion engine, with which Carnot was familiar and which he
described in some detail in his book. Although there existed some intuitive
understanding of the workings of engines, scientific theory for their operation
was almost nonexistent. In 1824 the principle of conservation of energy was
still poorly developed and controversial, and an exact formulation of the first
law of thermodynamics was still more than a decade away; the mechanical
equivalence of heat would not be formulated for another two decades. The
prevalent theory of heat was the caloric theory, which regarded heat as a sort
of weightless and invisible fluid that flowed when out of equilibrium.
Engineers in Carnot's time had
tried, by means such as highly pressurized steam and the use of fluids, to
improve the efficiency of engines. In these early stages of engine development,
the efficiency of a typical engine — the useful work it was able to do when a
given quantity of fuel was burned — was only 3%.
Carnot
cycle
Carnot wanted to answer two
questions about the operation of heat engines: "Is the work available from
a heat source potentially unbounded?" and "Can heat engines in
principle be improved by replacing the steam with some other working fluid or
gas?" He attempted to answer these in a memoir, published as a popular
work in 1824 when he was only 28 years old. It was entitled Réflexions sur
la Puissance Motrice du Feu ("Reflections on the Motive Power of
Fire"). The book was plainly intended to cover a rather wide range of
topics about heat engines in a rather popular fashion; equations were kept to a
minimum and called for little more than simple algebra and arithmetic, except
occasionally in the footnotes, where he indulged in a few arguments involving
some calculus. He discussed the relative merits of air and steam as working
fluids, the merits of various aspects of steam engine design, and even included
some ideas of his own regarding possible improvements of the practical nature.
The most important part of the book was devoted to an abstract presentation of
an idealized engine that could be used to understand and clarify the
fundamental principles that are generally applied to all heat engines,
independent of their design.
Perhaps the most important
contribution Carnot made to thermodynamics was his abstraction of the essential
features of the steam engine, as they were known in his day, into a more
general and idealized heat engine. This resulted in a model thermodynamic
system upon which exact calculations could be made, and avoided the
complications introduced by many of the crude features of the contemporary
steam engine. By idealizing the engine, he could arrive at clear and
indisputable answers to his original two questions.
He showed that the efficiency of
this idealized engine is a function only of the two temperatures of the
reservoirs between which it operates. He did not, however, give the exact form
of the function, which was later shown to be (T1−T2)/T1, where T1 is the absolute temperature of the hotter
reservoir. (Note: This equation probably came from Kelvin.) No thermal engine
operating any other cycle can be more efficient, given the same operating
temperatures.
The Carnot cycle is the most
efficient possible engine, not only because of the (trivial) absence of
friction and other incidental wasteful processes; the main reason is that it
assumes no conduction of heat between parts of the engine at different
temperatures. Carnot knew that the conduction of heat between bodies at
different temperatures is a wasteful and irreversible process, which must be
eliminated if the heat engine is to achieve maximum efficiency.
Regarding the second point, he
also was quite certain that the maximum efficiency attainable did not depend
upon the exact nature of the working fluid. He stated this for emphasis as a
general proposition:
The motive power of heat is
independent of the agents employed to realize it; its quantity is fixed solely
by the temperatures of the bodies between which is effected, finally, the
transfer of caloric.
— Carnot 1890, p. 68
For his "motive power of
heat", we would today say "the efficiency of a reversible heat
engine", and rather than "transfer of caloric" we would say
"the reversible transfer of entropy ∆S" or "the
reversible transfer of heat at a given temperature Q/T". He
knew intuitively that his engine would have the maximum efficiency, but was
unable to state what that efficiency would be.
He concluded:
The production of motive power
is therefore due in steam engines not to actual consumption of caloric but to
its transportation from a warm body to a cold body.
— Carnot 1960, p. 7
and
In the fall of caloric, motive
power evidently increases with the difference of temperature between the warm
and cold bodies, but we do not know whether it is proportional to this
difference.
— Carnot 1960, p. 15
In an idealized model, the
caloric transported from a hot to a cold body by a frictionless heat engine
that lacks of conductive heat flow, driven by a difference of temperature,
yielding work, could also be used to transport the caloric back to the hot body
by reversing the motion of the engine consuming the same amount of work, a
concept subsequently known as thermodynamic reversibility. Carnot further
postulated that no caloric is lost during the operation of his idealized
engine. The process being completely reversible, executed by this kind of heat
engine is the most efficient possible process. The assumption that heat
conduction driven by a temperature difference cannot exist, so that no caloric
is lost by the engine, guided him to design the Carnot-cycle to be operated by
his idealized engine. The cycle is consequently composed of adiabatic processes
where no heat/caloric ∆S = 0 flows and isothermal processes where
heat is transferred ∆S > 0 but no temperature difference ∆T
= 0 exist. The proof of the existence of a maximum efficiency for heat engines
is as follows:
As the cycle named after him
doesn't waste caloric, the reversible engine has to use this cycle. Imagine now
two large bodies, a hot and a cold one. He postulates now the existence of a
heat machine with a greater efficiency. We couple now two idealized machine but
of different efficiencies and connect them to the same hot and the same cold
body. The first and less efficient one lets a constant amount of entropy ∆S
= Q/T flow from hot to cold during each cycle, yielding an amount of work
denoted W. If we use now this work to power the other more efficient machine,
it would, using the amount of work W gained during each cycle by the first
machine, make an amount of entropy ∆S' > ∆S flow from the cold to
the hot body. The net effect is a flow of ∆S' − ∆S ≠ 0 of entropy
from the cold to the hot body, while no net work is done. Consequently, the
cold body is cooled down and the hot body rises in temperature. As the difference
of temperature rises now the yielding of work by the first is greater in the
successive cycles and due to the second engine difference in temperature of the
two bodies stretches by each cycle even more. In the end this set of machines
would be a perpetuum mobile that cannot exist. This proves that the assumption
of the existence of a more efficient engine was wrong so that an heat engine
that operates the Carnot cycle must be the most efficient one. This means that
a frictionless heat engine that lacks of conductive heat flow driven by a
difference of temperature shows maximum possible efficiency.
He concludes further that the
choice of the working fluid, its density or the volume occupied by it cannot
change this maximum efficiency. Using the equivalence of any working gas used
in heat engines he deduced that the difference in the specific heat of a gas
measured at constant pressure and at constant volume must be constant for all
gases. By comparing the operation of his hypothetical heat engines for two
different volumes occupied by the same amount of working gas he correctly
deduces the relation between entropy and volume for an isothermal process:
Reception and Philosophical
Views
Carnot's book
received very little attention from his contemporaries. The only reference to
it within a few years after its publication was in a review in the periodical Revue
Encyclopédique, which was a journal that covered a wide range of topics in
literature. The impact of the work had only become apparent once it was modernized
by Émile Clapeyron in 1834 and then further elaborated upon by Clausius and Kelvin,
who together derived from it the concept of entropy and the second law of
thermodynamics.
On Carnot's religious views, he
was a Philosophical theist. As a deist, he believed in divine causality,
stating that "what to an ignorant man is chance, cannot be chance to one
better instructed," but he did not believe in divine punishment. He
criticized established religion, though at the same time spoke in favor of
"the belief in an all-powerful Being, who loves us and watches over
us."
He was a reader of Blaise Pascal,
Molière and Jean de La Fontaine.
Death and Ultimate Reputation
Carnot died during a cholera
epidemic in 1832, at the age of 36. (Asimov 1982, p. 332) Because of the
contagious nature of cholera, many of Carnot's belongings and writings were
buried together with him after his death. As a consequence, only a handful of
his scientific writings survived.
After the publication of Reflections
on the Motive Power of Fire, the book quickly went out of print and for
some time was very difficult to obtain. Kelvin, for one, had a difficult time
getting a copy of Carnot's book. In 1890 an English translation of the book was
published by R. H. Thurston; this version has been reprinted in recent decades
by Dover and by Peter Smith, most recently by Dover in 2005. Some of
Carnot's posthumous manuscripts have also been translated into English.
Carnot published his book in the
heyday of steam engines. His theory explained why steam engines using
superheated steam were better because of the higher temperature of the
consequent hot reservoir. Carnot's theories and efforts did not immediately
help improve the efficiency of steam engines; his theories only helped to
explain why one existing practice was superior to others. It was only towards
the end of the nineteenth century that Carnot's ideas, namely that a heat
engine can be made more efficient if the temperature of its hot reservoir is
increased, were put into practice. Carnot's book did, however, eventually have
a real impact on the design of practical engines. Rudolf Diesel, for example,
used Carnot's theories to design the diesel engine, in which the temperature of
the hot reservoir is much higher than that of a steam engine, resulting in an
engine which is more efficient.
Processed Meats at a Grocery Store 
