preprints.org > engineering > mechanical engineering > doi: 10.20944/preprints202401.1556.v1

Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Version 1 : Received: 19 January 2024 / Approved: 22 January 2024 / Online: 22 January 2024 (05:51:59 CET)

In thermodynamic theory, free energy (i.e., available energy) is the concept facilitating the combined applications of the theory’s two fundamental laws, the first and the second laws of thermodynamics. The critical step was taken by Kelvin, then by Helmholtz and Gibbs— that in natural processes, free energy dissipates spontaneously. With the formulation of the second law of entropy growth, this may be referred to as the dissymmetry proposition manifested in the spontaneous increase of system/environment-entropy towards equilibrium. Because of Kelvin’s pre-entropy-law formulation of free energy, our concept of free energy is still defined, energy-centrally, as body’s internal energy or enthalpy, subtracted by energy that is not available within a framework on the premise of primacy of energy, in which free energy dissipates spontaneously and universally. This primacy of energy is called into question because the driving force to cause a system’s change is the purview of the second law. This paper makes a case for an engineering thermodynamics framework, instead, to be based on the premise of the primacy of dissymmetry over free energy. With Gibbsian thermodynamics undergirded with dissymmetry proposition and engineering thermodynamics with the dissymmetry premise, the two branches of thermodynamics are unified to become classical thermodynamics.

energy physics; free energy; energy conversion doctrine; extreme principles of equilibrium; dissymmetry premise; the CCG (Carnot∙Clausius∙Gibbs) account

Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

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