Entropy pollution of the environment: a

teaching approach to the Second Law

Jeffery Lewins
Cambridge University Engineering Department, Magdalene College, Cambridge CB3 0AG, UK
E-mail: jl22@cam.ac.uk
Abstract To introduce the concept of entropy to students, we propose building on what is currently a
well aired concept, that of thermal pollution of the environment. This is then clarified, refined and made
quantitative by the addition of the quality of heat, the temperature. The student will be familiar with the
idea that temperature differences drive heat flows. The new concept is that the individual temperatures
are significant, not just their difference. A high temperature drives a heat flow to a low temperature
and in so doing can provide something useful, like work. We pollute our environment if we dissipate
this opportunity. This approach leads naturally to the Second Law, to Carnot efficiency and the Kelvin
scale.
Keywords temperature scales; ideal Carnot engine; thermal efficiency; ideal perfect gas thermometer

Fear no more the heat o the sun

Nor the furious winters rages
(Cymbeline, W. Shakespeare)

Introduction
The concept of entropy is notoriously difficult to teach and, in my experience, firstyear engineers are not well prepared for this step. They need to have mastered the
idea of work as the necessary effort to move against a resisting force. They should
have studied heat transfer to calculate heat flows, analytically and perhaps with
simple finite difference methods to establish the concept of a temperature field. They
should have made measurements of temperature with various devices and used
practical scales of temperature. They will then be ready for the First Law in the form
that heat and work are manifestations of the transfer of energy and that work can be
wasted into heat at a constant, universal ratio1 that allows us to measure power flows,
mechanical and thermal, in common units of watts. They will also need to be happy
that heat flows naturally from hot to cold on any sensible scale of temperature;
going the other way consumes work. But like us all, they are probably handicapped
by the imprecise vocabulary that we inherit from the peculiar history of heat; a
calorimeter measures heat quantities, a thermal insulator stops heat flow but a thermometer measures temperature. And why are there so many temperature scales that
broadcasters have to use both Fahrenheit and Celsius?
1

A certain amount of work will always give you the same amount of heat, as Joule demonstrated in
Manchester, allowing us to measure energy in joules (J) and power in watts (W), whether heat or work.
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Students today will also be familiar with another concept, the thermal pollution
of our environment. This is a good starting point to introduce the Second Law, the
quantitative limit on turning heat flows to work flows.
Temperature as the quality of heat
I put forward therefore (Fig. 1) that it is not just the quantity of heat flows put in
and taken out of the environment that matter, but also their quality. Temperature
provides just such a quality of heat because a hot temperature has more capability
than a cold temperature: it moves heat naturally from hot to cold. What we need is
a temperature, , measured by some ideal thermometer on a numerical scale that has
this desirable property. We use the symbol at this stage for temperature until we
have made our choice.
Unlike the scales of Celsius, Centigrade, Fahrenheit, etc., the numbers should be
always positive so we can multiply and divide by this quality and not change the
direction of heat flows, destroying our sign convention for heat in and heat out. Just
adding a large, positive number to these practical scales is inadequate; how do we
know it is big enough not to go negative at some cold temperature? But at least there
is wide agreement that hot should be represented by a larger, higher number than
cold.2
The ideal thermal engine
Temperature as the quality of heat has more significance than simply dictating the
direction of natural heat flow. It must be a good thing in terms of pollution to take
heat out of the atmosphere at a rate Q1 and at a temperature or quality 1 and do
something useful with it. Ultimately we may have to return heat at a temperature or
quality 2 and at a rate Q2 W. If we have done nothing with the heat flow while it
is in our care then the heat rates are the same: Q2 = Q1 , with a sign convention for

Q 1 T1

Q 2
T2

Fig. 1

Heat exchange with the environment.

Another of the historical quirks is that Celsius originally proposed 100 for the freezing point of water
and zero for its boiling point. That one did not survive.
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J. Lewins

in and out. Indeed, this is just what would happen in the environment if left to itself,
with heat flowing from the hot region to the cold.
But what we should have done is to turn some of that heat into useful work while
it was in our care and thus decrease the heat rate returning to the environment and
decrease the thermal pollution. We can represent this by introducing an entropy flow
rate, S = Q/ W/?, where the ? in the units indicates that we have not yet defined
the unit of temperature on our scale. So let us give the unit a name: the kelvin,
symbol K, after William Thomson, Baron Kelvin, a great man in the history of
thermodynamics, and define it later.
Entropy as we have defined it, heat divided by its quality, is environmental pollution. If we do nothing with this heat (or leave it to degenerate in the environment)

1 1
then this pollution increases as S = Q1 = 1 2 Q1 > 0 , necessarily
2 1
1 2
positive, an additional entropy pollution. We should have used the opportunity to
turn some of the heat into work and thus reduce the rate of pollution we have gen
erated; the entropy generation rate is Sgen
= Q2 /2 Q1 /1. When this generation is
weighted by the temperature at which the entropy is released to the environment,
we have the dissipative power, the rate of thermal pollution that should have been

turned to mechanical power, 2Sgen

. So how shall we measure temperature as the
quality of heat?
Temperature, scales and thermometers
What do we know about temperatures, before choosing a thermometer and a scale?
This is the province of the so-called Zeroth Law. We are all familiar with the heat
of a summers day and the cold of a winters night, the hot stove and the cold refrigerator. Hot and cold are different temperatures. When hot and cold bodies are
brought into contact, things tend to change; the hot body typically contracts and the
cold body expands. Heat, a form of energy in transit, passes from hot to cold. Of
course we can delay or even stop this by preventing the thermal contact with a
thermal insulator. But supposing the contact remains good, and we do not supply
heat to the hot body; the heat transfer continues, but increasingly slowly, until it
stops and the two bodies are in thermal equilibrium. Then they have something in
common: the same temperature.
Thermal expansion or a similar change with temperature can be the basis of a
thermometer. For a thermometer to be useful, we need to be assured that when it
reads the same temperature in two separate bodies, these two bodies indeed have
the same temperature and would be in thermal equilibrium if brought into direct
thermal contact. The Zeroth Law states therefore that if system A is in thermal
equilibrium with system B and likewise system B with system C, then indeed C is
in thermal equilibrium with A. All three have the same temperature as measured by
a thermometer made from any one of the systems.3
3
This may seem obvious. Ask students for counter-examples in other fields such as twinning towns
or sports teams with different styles of play.

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To establish a numerical scale of temperature, we must agree the value or number

to be associated at two or more reproducible fixed temperature points; the chosen
thermometer then interpolates between these values. Popular practical choices are
the freezing point of water and its boiling point. On the centigrade scale these are
assigned the values 0 and 100 respectively.4 Now, some thermometer is chosen, such
as mercury in glass for length or a thermocouple for voltage, and other temperatures
are measured by linear interpolation or even extrapolation. There is no reason to
expect, though, that 50 on different thermometers should indicate the same temperature precisely.5 We need something better.
The ideal thermal cyclic engine of Carnot
Sadi de Carnot, a railway engineer concerned with the performance of steam engines,
had the key to the problem. Instead of looking at the detail of the combustion process
consuming coal (thermodynamics can do that later), he idealised the situation to a
thermal engine that takes in heat at a single, constant temperature from a reservoir
and similarly rejects heat.6 Model the engine as working in a closed cycle so that in
steady operation everything returns cyclically to the original state only heat has
been exchanged with the environment. This is obviously valid for steam engines,
where the steam is condensed and returned to the boiler, the Rankine cycle. Noncyclic engines have to be idealised and modelled as, say, Otto or Diesel cycles,
exchanging only heat with the environment.
This is the cyclic thermal engine that exchanges heat and does work in the form
equivalent to raising a weight against gravity. Now for the ideal thermal engine.
We know that an engine can be run backwards, taking in work and transferring
heat from a cold to a hot reservoir: a refrigerator. Carnots great insight was to see
that the ideal engine would be fully reversible. If all the original work was taken
back, the engine left unchanged at the end of a cycle and all the heat restored, there
would be no trace or evidence that the forwardbackward process had ever happened. Nothing would have changed overall and the engine would not just run
backwards but would be fully reversible.
Three significant things follow:
(1) All reversible thermal cyclic engines working between the same two temperatures have the same efficiency, the fraction of heat taken and turned into work,
revc = 1 Q1(1)/Q2(2), and therefore, what is more useful, the same ratio of
heat taken in from the environment to the heat returned, Q1(1)/Q2(2)revc =
const, dependent only on the temperatures.
4
These definitions are not precise because these fixed points vary with pressure. Skaters know that
the pressure of the blade melts the ice beneath and mountaineers know that tea making is difficult because
the lower pressure lowers the boiling point of water.
5
The student could be asked to look at the detailed and different correction tables for different thermocouple pairs.
6
For more than two reservoirs and temperatures, model a compound thermal engine from two-reservoir
units.

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J. Lewins

(2)

No irreversible engine has a better efficiency than a reversible engine operating

between the same temperatures.
(3) There is an absolute zero temperature.
These claims are justified by supposing we could indeed construct a device which
contradicted the claim and then testing the claim against some common-sense facts
that make up the Second Law of thermodynamics.7 We appeal to experience and
common sense. Engineers might well regard the Second Law as a statement of the
obvious; you do not get something useful for nothing.8
To prove the first corollary, suppose there was indeed a more efficient reversible
engine; it produces more work from the same heat input and returns less heat. So
use another reversible engine to drive this worse engine backward, restoring heat
to the hot reservoir using all the work from the better engine. But by assumption,
you are pumping more heat from the lower reservoir than it is receiving. Congratulations, you have invented a work-free refrigerator, allowing heat to flow naturally
to higher temperature!
To prove the second, suppose there was a better irreversible engine. So drive a
reversible engine backward needing less work to balance out the heat into the cold
reservoir. Congratulations, you have net work left over simply taking heat from one
reservoir and not returning any. You would become rich taking work from any
constant-temperature ocean.
For the third corollary, surely we cannot have a thermal efficiency greater than
unity, taking heat from two reservoirs and producing only work? So the heat ratio
cannot change sign.
The way forward is now simple: use the Carnot ratio in an ideal reversible thermal
engine(the restriction to reversible is essential) as our thermometer and write:9
T
Q
= rev
T0
Q0

(1)

(The negative sign comes from our sign convention for the direction of heat flow.)
We use the symbol T for such an absolute temperature and use t on a practical scale
not having an absolute zero.
One point on our scale is the absolute zero, allowing us to call this the absolute
scale. Here, T0 is a further single fixed calibration number we agree to give to a
convenient reproducible system. The internationally agreed Kelvin scale of temperature agrees that the triple point of pure water, where ice, liquid and steam coexist
in equilibrium, shall be at 273.15 kelvin (K). This unlikely number was chosen in
7

The Second Law has many versions, all coming to the same thing: you cannot get something for
nothing in the real world. It is like the various reports of a blindfolded committee on examining the first
elephant; one feels a leg, one a tail, one a trunk, etc. All report aspects of the same beast.
8
Einstein described common sense as the layer of prejudice laid down by the age of 18. Appropriate
perhaps in quantum physics but not, I suggest, in engineering.
9
The student might reasonably ask, after the emphasis given to the Carnot efficiency, why this does
not appear in the definition of temperature. We use the reversible heat ratio because it is unique. We
would have the same Carnot efficiency from two different temperatures satisfying T1/T0 = T0/T2.
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order that the gap between the freezing point and the boiling point of water might
remain about 100 K and hence follow a familiar Celsius scale close to the centigrade
scale, but where temperatures below freezing are negative and therefore useless for
our present purposes. For the purist, the unit of temperature on the Celsius scale is
the kelvin; there is no degree, even though we have to write the symbol as C to
avoid confusion with the coulomb.10
Since the reversible heat ratio cannot go negative, there is no temperature below
zero on our scale. It is therefore called an absolute scale, since it has an absolute
zero.11 The other agreed scaling point is arbitrary and not absolute, so on this scale
we are not like length, needing to scratch marks to define the unit of distance, but
like mass, where we cannot conceive of negative mass but fix the kilogram arbitrarily
as the mass of a lump of matter kept at Sevres. The analogy is not an accidental
coincidence. Following Einstein and special relativity, energy and mass are connected as E = mc2, so that energy, too, cannot be negative and has an absolute zero,
needing only a single calibration point. Boltzmann studied the distribution of kinetic
energy in simple molecules. In equilibrium, there is a distribution of speeds and
energies, an average as the molecules collide with each other. In this view, the temperature on the absolute scale is simply an average energy per molecule at the
3
equilibrium temperature, kT , where k is Boltzmanns constant, connected to the
2
universal molar gas constant, R, by Avogadros constant, N0, so that R = kN0.
This identification with the ideal gas laws brings a very welcome practicality to
our theoretical, ideal absolute scale of temperature. In the range of ideal gases, the
product of absolute (not gauge) pressure and volume are proportional to the absolute
temperature: PV = RT. Constant-pressure or constant-volume thermometers are
therefore measuring temperature on the ideal Carnot scale.12
Entropy pollution of the world
We can now denote the rate of entropy pollution of the environment where heat is
exchanged at different temperatures. The rate of entropy generation is:
10
There is a conceptual problem that cannot easily be resolved about the meaning of temperature in
a body not in thermal equilibrium. Our thermal reservoirs are large and separated, large enough for their
temperature to remain unchanged during the process, an idealization allowing us to treat them as in
thermal equilibrium and therefore at a precise temperature. But what is temperature along a bar, say,
held hot at one end and cold at the other? The bar may be at steady state but not in thermal equilibrium.
The pragmatic answer is that if the active region of the thermometer is small enough we can suppose the
temperature of the bar does not vary (much) and we accept a local average. But there are circumstances
in quantum physics, say, where an intense non-equilibrium gradient makes identification difficult. Most
engineers accept the pragmatic view; to adapt the well known curse, may the instructor be blessed with
more inquisitive students!
11
This is where we have, as teachers, to tell a white lie; there are negative temperatures but they are
hotter than infinity, not colder than zero.
12
A further white lie: although the simple point molecules come to rest with zero kinetic energy and
zero temperature, their electrons are governed by FermiDirac statistics and retain a zero-point energy
at zero temperature.

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J. Lewins

Sgen =

Q1 Q2

0
T1 T2

(2)

with temperatures measured on our absolute scale (equation 1). Since the reversible
heat ratio (Q1/Q2)rev is greater than for any real, irreversible process, the rate of
generation of entropy is positive except for the limiting, reversible process, when it
is zero. Thus entropy is a conserved property only in reversible processes, in contrast
to energy, which is conserved in all processes if we include relativity.
The dissipation is given by:
dissipation = T Sgen

(3)

If we use T1 in this expression, we have the work (or mechanical power) that should
have been drawn from the hot reservoir. If we use T2 we have the amount of energy
returned to the cold reservoir as heat that should have been taken as work.
These results led to Clausius putting forward yet another view of the Second Law:
the energy of the universe is constant but its entropy is increasing. Those cosmologists who favour continuous creation would disagree, but consider how we might
interpret this at the world level. If our world, the Earth, were isolated, the dictum
would apply on the terrestrial scale: taking heat out of the environment and returning it after utilizing, as far as possible, the temperature difference. But the Earth is
not isolated: it receives a continuous supply of solar radiation, characterised by the
Suns surface temperature, some 4 kK and re-radiates to space at some 300 K. The
balance is complicated by the heat coming from the hot magma core and the radioactive decay of certain minerals. Even in steady state, therefore, we are contributing
to the entropy pollution of the universe.
Logic then suggests that to reduce entropy pollution we should, as engineers, seek
to extract work from sunlight, either directly or by taming the results of the great
solar engine in the form of wave power and wind power, or, above all, perhaps, in
the formation of biomass, as a store of entropy.

Conclusion
I hope that this approach to the Second Law in the context of environmental pollution may be of interest to colleagues. Students often regard the whole concept of the
ideal, reversible thermal engine as a highly impractical theoretical artifice.13 But we
actually have a highly practical limit to the performance of real engines telling us
how far away we are from our goal, the limit of ideal performance and whether,
then, it is worthwhile to attempt improvements to our designs. This I suggest is the
real practical value of studying thermodynamics.

13

Is it not of practical use that the limit

1
2

+ 14 + 81 + ... = 1 even if we cannot carry out all the steps?

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Sources
[1] J. D. Lewins, Engineering Thermodynamics: Frontiers and Foundations, (OECD Nuclear Energy
14
Agency, Paris, 2009).
[2] J. D. Lewins, Teaching Thermodynamics (Plenum, London, 1985).
[3] And see www.teachingthermodynamics.co.uk.

14

For a free copy on CD-ROM email programs@nea.fr specifying Heritage Books, Lewins,
Thermodynamics.
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