Rationale for a Second Law

Let us now return to Carnot s work and consider the following question Is the maximum work produced by the steam engine sufficient reason for a chemical engineer to get involved with the second law and, especially, with the associated concept of entropy that seems to haunt anyone dealing with thermodynamics  

While the development of the second law started with Carnot s work on the efficiency of the steam engine, the law covers a broad spectrum of phenomena. Let us consider some of them. 

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