Graxaim/Virtual Thermodynamics Laboratory: A Configurable Application for Simulating Thermodynamic Processes

We developed and present an application to be integrated into web pages named Graxaim – Virtual Thermodynamics Laboratory, or Graxaim/LVT. Through configuration files, the application can be used to propose different virtual experimental problem situations, with different subsystems and measurement equipment, equivalent to different experimental kits. We present the algorithm based on the maximum entropy principle that we developed for the thermal and mechanical interactions used by the application to simulate a wide variety of reversible and irreversible thermodynamic processes. The application has seven pre-installed configurations. We used one of them to show how the chaining of thermodynamic processes, obtained by modifying experimental arrangements, can be used to simulate a Carnot Cycle. We show how technical difficulties of the simulator can be resolved through irreversible processes that degrade the efficiency of the heat engine and argue that this discussion can be used to make analogies with technical difficulties of real machines. The results of the equilibrium states obtained in the simulation were compared with the expected theoretical results and the average relative deviations were found to be less than 0.1%.

Keywords:
Virtual laboratory; thermodynamics; thermodynamic processes; simulation