2. ideal-gas temperature and thermodynamic temperature scale are identical since both scales are based on absolute temperature.

8 . T H E T H E R M O DY N A M I C T E M P E RAT U R E S C A L E

For a reversible engine, both the efficiency and the ratio

Q2/Ql can be calculated directly

from the measurable quantities of work and heat flowing to the surroundings. Therefore we have measurable properties that depend on temperatures only and are independent of the properties of any special kind of substance. Consequently, it is possible to establish a scale of temperature independent of the properties of any individual substance. This overcomes the difficulty associated with empirical scales of temperature described in Section 6.5. This scale is the absolute, or the thermodynamic, temperature scale. We operate a reversible heat engine in the following way. The low-temperature reservoir is at some fixed low temperature to hightemperature reservoir at t, an amount of heat Q will flow from this reservoir and a positive amount of work will be produced. Keeping to and Qo constant, we increase the temperature of the other reservoir to some higher temperature t'. Experimentally we find that more heat Q' is withdrawn from the reservoir at t'. Thus the heat withdrawn from the hightemperature reservoir increases with increase in temperature. For this reason we choose the heat withdrawn from the high-temperature reservoir as the thermometric property. We can define the thermodynamic temperature by

. The to is the temperature on any empirical scale. The heat withdrawn from this reservoir is Qo . If we run the engine with the

Q = a, (8.16)
where a is a constant and Q is the heat withdrawn from the reservoir. Writing Eq.

(8.15) in the notation for, this situation, it becomes Qo/Q = get, to). From this it is clear that if Qo and to are constant, then Q is a function of t only. In Eq. (8.16) we have arbitrarily chosen Q as a simple and reasonable function of the absolute temperature. The work produced in the cycle is W = Q + Qo , which, using Eq. (8.16), becomes W = a + Qo . (8.17)
Now if the high-temperature reservoir is cooled until it reaches ()o

, the temperature of

the cold reservoir, then the cycle becomes an isothermal cycle, and no work can be

produced. Since it is a reversible cycle, W

= 0, and so 0 = ao + Qo ; hence, Qo = - ao

Then Eq. (8.17) becomes

8.18
For the efficiency we obtain

Since there is nothing special about the temperature of the cold reservoir, except that
> o

, Eqs. (8.18) and (8.19) apply to any reversible heat engine operating between any two thermodynamic temperatures and o . Equation (8.18) shows that the work
produced in a reversible heat engine is directly proportional to the difference in temperatures on the thermodynamic scale, while the efficiency is equal to the ratio of the difference in temperature to the temperature of the hot reservoir. The Carnot formula, Eq.

(8.19), which relates the efficiency of a reversible engine to the temperatures of the
reservoirs is probably the most celebrated formula in all of thermodynamics. Lord Kelvin was the first to define the thermodynamic temperature scale, named in his honor, from the properties of reversible engines. If we choose the same size of the degree for both the Kelvin scale and the ideal gas scale, and adjust the proportionality constant a in Eq. (8.16) to conform to the ordinary definition of one mole of an ideal gas, then the ideal gas scale and the Kelvin scale become numerically identical. However, the Kelvin scale is the fundamental one. From now on we will use temperature,

T for the thermodynamic

= T, except where the use of can supply needed emphasis.