 | Émile Clapeyron: Encyclopedia - Émile Clapeyron
Émile Clapeyron
Benoit Paul Émile Clapeyron (February 26, 1799 - January 28, 1864) was an French engineer and physicist, one of the founders of thermodynamics.
Émile Clapeyron - 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.
Émile Clapeyron - Work
Émile Clapeyron - 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, in which it developed the work of the physicist Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, deceased two years before. Though Carnot had developed a compelling anaysis 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.
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.
Émile Clapeyron - Other work
Clapeyron also worked on the characterisation of perfect gases, the equilibrium of homogeneous solids, and calculations of the statics of beams.
Émile Clapeyron - 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.
Other related archives1799, 1820, 1834, 1843, 1858, 1864, 8th arrondissement, Académie des Sciences, Carnot cycle, Clausius-Clapeyron relation, February 26, French, January 28, Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, Paris, Revolution of July 1830, Saint Petersburg, Saint-Germain, Stefan problems, The 72 names on the Eiffel Tower, Versailles, beams, caloric theory, chart, curve, engineer, equilibrium, heat engine, indicator diagram, matter, perfect gases, phase transition, phases, physicist, pressure, railway, reversible process, second law of thermodynamics, solids, statics, thermodynamics, volume, École des Mines, École polytechnique
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