ABSTRACT
References............................................................................................................. 162
All of the concepts and relationships developed so far in this text visualize a
thermodynamic system as consisting of some continuous medium or as a collection
of separate media, each of which is continuous. A system is endowed with properties
such as heat capacity, coefficient of expansion, an equation of state, and so on.
Knowledge of the variation of these properties with the state of the system is
sufficient to describe the macroscopic phenomena that the system may experience.
This level of description of the behavior of matter is called “phenomenological”
thermodynamics. No use has been made of the idea that the substance of this
continuum is actually composed of atoms or molecules and that the behavior of the
system is somehow related to the properties of the particles that compose it.
