![]() ![]() ![]() “People have been working on extending the laws of thermodynamics for systems not in equilibrium for over 100 years,” he says. “Most of what people had figured out is how to extend the laws of thermodynamics for systems that are close to equilibrium. Even this is a huge step forward and has been useful in many fields of science.” “The part that has been challenging has been the theoretical work to figure out how to extend or improve upon the original laws of thermodynamics when systems aren’t in equilibrium,” Cassak told The Debrief. However, the conditions under which the laws of thermodynamics were developed at that time dictated that they would onlywork for systems in equilibrium, and Cassak says attempting to revise existing theories about thermodynamics hasn’t been a simple task. “The laws of thermodynamics were developed about 170 years ago,” Cassak told The Debrief, “and the technology of the time dictated the gases or fluids that people would have studied are in equilibrium at the densities and temperatures that they were using back then.”Ī good example of equilibrium would be how individual vessels filled with water at different temperatures within the same environment will eventually either cool or warm until they reach the same temperature. West Virginia University Professor Paul Cassak. Cassak is associate director of the Center for KINETIC Plasma Physics, where along with graduate research assistant Hasan Barbhuiya he studies the ways energy is converted in superheated plasmas in space. “The first law has been used to describe many things,” says Paul Cassak, a professor of Theoretical and Computational Plasma Physics at West Virginia University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. More simply, the idea is commonly expressed as “energy can neither be created or destroyed.” ![]() The first law of thermodynamics, an expression of the law of conservation of energy albeit styled with relation to thermodynamic processes, conveys that the total energy within a system will remain constant, but that it can be converted from one form of energy into another. The discovery, involving how energy is converted in plasmas in space, was described in new research published in the journal Physical Review Letters, and could potentially require scientists to have to rethink how plasmas are heated both in the lab and in space. Here we demonstrate the use of TCG in problems spanning a wide range of scales including fully compressible mantle convection, magma transport at plate boundaries and reactive transport for carbon sequestration.Physicists in West Virginia have announced a potential breakthrough that could help upend a longstanding constraint imposed by the first law of thermodynamics. Multiple examples are given in the documentation. ThermoCodegen, however, also adds several key features including: 1) storage of thermodynamic models and custom thermodynamic databases as reusable xml files 2) code generation of custom kinetic reaction models built on the phase databases and 3) generation of C++ libraries and python bindings for inclusion in other modeling systems such as TerraFERMA, ASPECT, jupyter notebooks and ThermoEngine. ![]() A key feature of coder is the use of symbolic python (SymPy) to generate thermodynamically consistent high-performance C code, for a wide range of thermodynamic properties of endmembers and phases given analytic models of their Gibbs (or Helmholtz) free energy. TCG is part of the larger ENKI project for thermodynamic modeling and shares the same code-generation module (coder.py) as the ENKI code ThermoEngine (Ghiorso and Wolf). Here we introduce ThermoCodegen (TCG), an open source software package that provides code-generation tools for developing and exploring reproducible, custom thermodynamic models and reaction kinetics libraries for use in a wide range of applications. To address these challenges requires flexible modeling software that allows the user to control the degree of complexity in both thermodynamic and geodynamic models. These problems are strongly coupled, non-linear, and involve large numbers of variables and remain some of the outstanding computational challenges in solid-earth science. The consistent integration of thermodynamics and geodynamics is central to a wide range of problems from mantle convection with consistent phase changes, to open system reactive transport during fluid/magma migration. ![]()
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