Conventional and Alternative Power Generation

Preface

Thermodynamics, often translated as ‘movement of heat’, is simply the science of energy and work. Energy itself is described as the capacity to do work.

French steam engineer Nicolas Leonard Sadi Carnot, who was well aware that the realization of water power is a function of water level or head difference across a turbine, suggested in 1824 that capacity for work and power across a heat engine would be dependent on the prevailing temperature difference.

Between 1840 and 1850, British scientist and inventor James Joule investigated the nature of work in a range of forms, for example, electrical current, gas compression and the stirring of a liquid. He concluded from his work that ‘lost’ mechanical energy would express itself as heat, for example, friction, air resistance etc., and hence spoke of the mechanical equivalent of heat.

In 1847, German physicist, Hermann Von Helmholtz first postulated the principle of energy accountancy and energy conservation. In 1849, British physicist William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) is thought to have coined the term Thermodynamics to describe the subject of energy study, and the Helmholtz principle became enshrined as the First law of thermodynamics.

In 1850, German physicist Rudolf Julius Emmanuel Clausius used the term entropy to describe non‐useful heat and proposed that, in universal terms, entropy increase is a natural, spontaneous process, leading to the development of a Second law of thermodynamics. This can be stated in several ways ...