Equation of State and Other Properties of Realistic Materials in the Vicinity of Their Critical Points.
Abstract
Engines of all sorts, from steam engines to those used in nuclear power plants, require a knowledge of a) the precise location of phase transition lines, b) exactly what happens when a material (such as steam) is moved across a given phase transition line. This information is essential from the engineering point of view because only with this information can one hope to have a truly efficient engine design. Phase transitions have become an extremely active field of research because of this need. Engineers, chemists, physicists, metallurgists, and mathematicians have cooperated in a multidisciplinary effort to learn new information of this subject. These efforts can be broadly categorized as follows: a) studies focussed on critical point exponents describing the behavior of a single function as a single variable is changed; b) studies focussed on equation of state describing the behavior of a function when all thermodynamic variables are changed. The focus of this contract has been category (b), equation of state. A simple example of an equation of state is provided by a simple magnet in the vicinity of the Curie temperature Tc. (Author)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 31, 1976
- Accession Number
- ADA043096
Entities
People
- H. Eugene Stanley
Organizations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology