(Redirected from Émile Clapeyron)
Benoit Paul Émile Clapeyron
'Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron' (
February 26,
1799 -
January 28,
1864) was a
French engineer and
physicist, one of the founders of
thermodynamics.
Life
Born in
Paris, Clapeyron studied at the
École polytechnique and the
École des Mines, before leaving for
Saint Petersburg in
1820 to teach at the ''École des Travaux Publics''. He returned to Paris only after the
Revolution of July 1830, supervising the construction of the first
railway line connecting Paris to
Versailles and
Saint-Germain.
Work
Thermodynamics
In
1834, he made his first contribution to the creation of modern thermodynamics by publishing a report entitled the ''Driving force of the heat'' (''Puissance motrice de la chaleur''), in which it developed the work of the physicist
Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, deceased two years before. Though Carnot had developed a compelling analysis of a generalised
heat engine, he had employed the clumsy and already unfashionable
caloric theory.
Clapeyron, in his memoire, presented Carnot's work in a more accessible and analytic graphical form, showing the
Carnot cycle as a closed
curve on an
indicator diagram, a
chart of
pressure against
volume (named in his honor Clapeyron's graph).
In
1843, Clapeyron further developed the idea of a
reversible process, already suggested by Carnot and made a definitive statement of ''Carnot's principle'', what is now known as the
second law of thermodynamics.
These foundations enabled him to make substantive extensions of
Clausius' work, including the formula, now known as the
Clausius-Clapeyron relation, which characterises the
phase transition between two
phases of
matter. He further considered questions of phase transitions in what later became known as
Stefan problems.
Other work
Clapeyron also worked on the characterisation of
perfect gases, the
equilibrium of homogeneous
solids, and calculations of the
statics of
beams.
Publications
★ Clapeyron E. (1834), Puissance motrice de la chaleur, ''Journal de l'École Royale Polytechnique'', Vingt-troisième cahier, Tome XIV, 153-190.
Honors
★ Member of the
Académie des Sciences, (
1858).
★ The ''Rue Clapeyron'' in
Paris'
8th arrondissement is named for him.
★ He is one of ''
The 72 names on the Eiffel Tower''.
See also
★
Ideal Gas Law
External links
★
★
A modern version of Clapeyron's graph as a
java applet
العربية
中国
Français
Deutsch
Ελληνική
हिन्दी
Italiano
日本語
Português
Русский
Español
