Source: A Working Guide to Process Equipment

CHAPTER

34

Gas Compression:
The Basic Idea
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Made Easy

his chapter establishes the basis for the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is not critical that you read this chapter to be able
to understand the more practical chapters on compression that
follow. But for those readers who have technical training, wouldnt it
be lovely to actually understand the basis for the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. Wouldnt it be grand to really see the beauty and
simplicity of the basis for the adiabatic compression work equation:
Work = P1V1

(K 1)/K

K P2
1

K 1 P1

I have also written this chapter so that the nontechnical reader

can easily comprehend the basis for this Second Law.

34.1

Relationship between Heat and Work

Robert Julius Mayer was a physician practicing near Bavaria in the
1840s. As part of his research into human metabolism, he decided to
determine the equivalence between heat and work.
Heat means British thermal units, or the amount of fuel we have
to burn to increase the temperature of a pound of water by one degree
Fahrenheit. Work means foot-pounds, or the amount of effort needed
to raise a one pound brick by one foot.
The experiments that people like Dr. Mayer performed established
the technical basis for the industrial revolution. Dr. Mayer himself
laid the foundation for the main pillar supporting this technical basis.

419
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A Working Guide to Process Equipment

This was the science of thermodynamics. But in the nineteenth century,
they had not coined the word thermodynamics. They called it heat in
motion.1 The branch of science that we now call thermodynamics was
developed by simply heating air under different conditions.
For example, let us pretend we are heating air with a wax
candle. The air is confined inside a glass cylinder. We can assume
that all the heat generated by burning the wax is absorbed by the air
inside the cylinder. This is called an adiabatic process. I have shown a
picture of the cylinder in Fig. 34.1.
The air in this cylinder is confined by a glass piston. The edges of the
piston have been greased, so that the piston can glide without friction,
up and down through the cylinder. But the edges of the piston itself have
been so carefully grounded that no air can slip between the greased
piston and the walls of the cylinder. This means that the pounds of air
contained in the cylinder below the piston will always be constant.
Dr. Mayer first wanted to determine how much wax he had to burn
to heat the air inside the cylinder by 100F. At this point in the experiment,
he had to make a decision. Should he allow the expanding hot air to
push the piston up? Or should he fix the position of the piston?
If the piston was kept in a fixed position, the pounds of air trapped
inside the cylinder would continue to occupy a constant volume, as

FIGURE 34.1
Measuring specific
heats.

Piston

Hot
air

Cylinder

Candle

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421

the air was heated. The pressure of the air would increase as it was
heated, but the volume of air would remain constant.
If the piston was not kept in a fixed position, the pounds of air
trapped inside the cylinder would stay at a constant pressure as the
air was heated. The volume of the air would increase as it was heated,
but the pressure of the air would remain constant.
Which is the correct way to conduct this experiment? Again, the
objective of this experiment is to see how much wax has to be burned
(which I will now call heat) to increase the temperature of a fixed
weight of air by 100F. Well, Dr. Mayer decided to conduct the
experiment in both ways, to see if it made any difference. And this
decision by Dr. Mayer was a turning point in human history.
Dr. Mayer already knew the weight of wax needed to heat 1 lb of
water by 1F. His British colleagues had previously determined this
quantity and had called it a British thermal unit (Btu).
He began by heating the air with the piston in a fixed position.
Thus, the volume of air heated was kept constant. The amount of heat
(in Btu) needed to heat a fixed weight of air, under constant volume
conditions, he called Cv. This is now called the specific heat of air at
constant volume.
Next, Dr. Mayer heated the air, but allowed the piston to rise as
the hot air expanded. This kept the pressure in the cylinder just a little
bit above atmospheric pressure. The Btu needed to heat a fixed weight
of air under constant pressure conditions, he called Cp.
Well, Cp turned out to be a lot higher than Cv. Dr. Mayer thought
about this and concluded that he had made a mistake in his experiment.
The mistake was the weight of the piston. When he measured Cp, he
had forgotten about the work needed to raise the heavy piston. Some
of the heat generated by the burning wax was being converted to work
to raise the heavy piston (work equals foot-pounds).
So Dr. Mayer repeated his experiment. He made the piston so
light that its weight could be neglected. This helped, but still, Cp
now known as the specific heat of air at constant pressurepersisted
in being about 40 percent larger than Cv. He reasoned that the
expanding air must still be doing work and, therefore, converting
some of the heat from the candle into work. But if the piston no longer
had any significant weight, what sort of work could the expanding
air be doing? Dr. Mayers answer to this question changed history.
The expanding air was doing compression work. But what was being
compressed? Not the air inside the cylinder, which, according to Dr. Mayer,
was doing the work. This air was kept at a constant pressure. Certainly,
this air was not being compressed. No, dear reader, Dr. Mayer said that it
was the air outside the cylinder that was being compressed. In other words,
all the other molecules in the sea of air surrounding our planet were
pushed a little closer together by the expanding air in the cylinder.
Or, the air, which expands on heating, does work on its
surrounding environment. But if we heat the air and dont allow it to

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A Working Guide to Process Equipment

expand, it cannot do any work on its environment. Lets just stop for
a moment and give all these words some real teeth.
Lets say I allow air to expand, but I do not supply it with any
extra heat from an outside source. The air is expanding because I am
allowing it to push away a piston in a cylinder. What do you think
happens to the temperature of this expanding air? Isnt it true that
whenever a gas (like air and natural gas) expands, it gets colder?

34.2

Compression Work (Cp Cv )

The specific heat at constant pressure (i.e., Cp) is a measure of the
amount of heat we put into the air, trapped inside the cylinder as
shown in Fig. 34.1. Some of this heat is used to increase the temperature
of the trapped air by 1F. The rest of the heat goes into the work
required to force the piston up and hence compressing the air
surrounding the planet Earth.
The specific heat at constant volume (i.e., Cv) is a measure of the
amount of heat we put into the air trapped inside the cylinder. All this
heat goes to increasing the temperature of the trapped air by 1F.
None of the heat goes into compression work, because the piston
remains fixed.
The difference between Cp and Cv is then compression work:
Work = Cp Cv
How can we determine how much work is being done? There are
two ways to calculate the amount of compression work that the piston
is doing on the atmosphere of air surrounding the planet:
Method 1. Take the pounds of wax burned when Cp was measured. Then take the pounds of wax burned when Cv was measured.
Find the difference between the two weights of wax. Burning one
pound of wax generates about 18,000 Btu/lb. Lets say we burned
8 lb of wax when measuring Cp. We burned 6 lb of wax when measuring Cv. The amount of heat that has then gone into work is
(8 lb  6 lb)  18,000 = 36,000 Btu
or
Cp Cv = work
We currently know that one Btu is equal to 740 ft-lb worth of work.
Therefore, the work performed by the expanding air equals
740 36,000 = 26,700,000 ft/lb
If none of this work was wasted, we could use it to lift a 1000-lb
rock up to the top of Mount Everest (which is about 26,000 ft high).
But in the 1840s, Robert Mayer did not know the conversion factor

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of heat equivalent to work of 740 ft-lb per Btu. It had not been determined yet, because Dr. Mayer was the one who first discovered it.
So Dr. Mayer had to use the following method.
Method 2. Lets say the diameter of the piston in Fig. 34.1 was 40 ft.
The area of such a piston is 1256 ft2. The burning wax is causing the
weightless piston to be pushed up by 100 ft by the air, as it is heated
and expands. The piston is being pushed up against an atmospheric
pressure of 14.7 psia. Let us remember that there are 144 in2 in a
square foot. So that I can say that atmospheric pressure is actually
14.7 144 = 2117 lb/ft2
The total force of the atmospheric pressure pressing down on
my piston is then
2117 lb/ft2 1256 ft2 = 267,000 lb of force
Well, work equals force times distance. The piston is traveling a distance of 100 ft. Therefore, the work done by the expanding air, is
100 ft 267,000 lb = 26,700,000 ft-lb
Distance force = work
Dr. Mayer used our second method. He knew that the heat of
combustion of 2 lb of wax was 36,000 Btu. He divided
26, 700, 000 ft-lb
ft-lb
= 740
36, 000 Btu
Btu
to obtain the heat equivalent of work. It would be impossible to
design an industrial process unit without knowing this fact.
The difference Cp  Cv is proportional to the amount of work the
piston could perform when supplied with a total amount of heat,
proportional to Cp. Then the ratio
C p Cv C p Cv
C
=

= 1 v
Cp
Cp Cp
Cp
is equal to the fraction of useful work we could recover from a total
heat input proportional to Cp.
The term Cp/Cv is usually called K (the ratio of the specific heats).
If I substituted K into the preceding equation, I would obtain
1

1 K 1 K 1
= =
K K K
K

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A Working Guide to Process Equipment

Does that look familiar? It really ought to, if you have any type of
engineering training. Remember the formula for compression work
given at the start of this chapter and in our thermodynamics textbooks:
Work = P1V1

(K 1)/K

K P2
1

K 1 P1

where P1 = suction pressure, psia

P2 = discharge pressure, psia
V1 = suction volume, ft3/s
K = Cp/Cv

There is another, nonmathematical, way to think about the

difference between Cp and Cv. To extract work from any process
requires an energy input, like burning wax. Some of this energy will
be extracted as work (Cp Cv). But most of this energy input will wind
up as heat (Cv).
This is the nasty, but inescapable, lesson learned from the Second
Law of Thermodynamics, which is derived from Julius Mayers work.
A few examples will suffice to close this chapter:
A modern car engine converts about 12 to 15 percent of the
energy in the gasoline to shaft horsepower extracted from the
engine.
The most efficient engine ever made is the Rolls-Royce highbypass jet engine that we see on commercial aircraft. This
engine converts about 39 percent of the energy in the jet fuel
(which is kerosene) to thrust.
A modern power station converts about 30 percent of the
energy in the fuel burned to exported electrical energy.
The ratio of (Cp Cv)/Cp for air is about 30 percent.

Reference
1. J. Tyndall, Heat a Mode of Motion, 6th ed., Longmans, London, U.K., 1880.

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