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Applications of Piezoelectric Accelerometers

Piezoelectric measuring devices are widely used today in the laboratory, on the production floor,
and as original equipment for measuring and recording dynamic changes in mechanical variables
including shock and vibration. The following is only a partial list:

 Aerospace. Modal testing, wind tunnel, and shock tube instrumentation; landing gear
hydraulics; rocketry; structures; ejection systems
 Ballistics. Combustion, explosion, and detonation
 Engine Testing. Combustion and dynamic stressing
 Engineering. Materials evaluation, control systems, reactors, structural analysis, auto
chassis structural testing, shock and vibration isolation, and dynamic response testing
 Industrial/Factory. Machining systems, metal cutting, and machine health monitoring
 OEMs. Transportation systems, rockets, machine tools, engines, flexible structures, and
shock/vibration testers
 Strain gauge:

Applications:

 Aircraft Flight Test

 Missile/Rocket Test
 Suspension Test
 Deceleration/Brake Test
 Seismic:

Potential Applications
- Seismic measurements of bridges, buildings, and other large civic structures

The history of thermodynamics is a fundamental strand in the history of physics, the history of
chemistry, and the history of science in general. Owing to the relevance of thermodynamics in much of
science and technology, its history is finely woven with the developments of classical mechanics,
quantum mechanics, magnetism, and chemical kinetics, to more distant applied fields such as
meteorology, information theory, and biology (physiology), and to technological developments such as
the steam engine, internal combustion engine, cryogenics and electricity generation. The development
of thermodynamics both drove and was driven by atomic theory. It also, albeit in a subtle manner,
motivated new directions in probability and statistics; see, for example, the timeline of thermodynamics.

Atomism is a central part of today's relationship between thermodynamics and statistical

mechanics. Ancient thinkers such as Leucippus and Democritus, and later the Epicureans, by
advancing atomism, laid the foundations for the later atomic theory. Until experimental proof of
atoms was later provided in the 20th century, the atomic theory was driven largely by
philosophical considerations and scientific intuition. Consequently, ancient philosophers used
atomic theory to reach conclusions that today may be viewed as immature: for example,
Democritus gives a vague atomistic description of the soul, namely that it is "built from thin,
smooth, and round atoms, similar to those of fire".

The 5th century BC, Greek philosopher Parmenides, in his only known work, a poem
conventionally titled On Nature, uses verbal reasoning to postulate that a void, essentially what
is now known as a vacuum, in nature could not occur. This view was supported by the arguments
of Aristotle, but was criticized by Leucippus and Hero of Alexandria. From antiquity to the
Middle Ages various arguments were put forward to prove or disapprove the existence of a
vacuum and several attempts were made to construct a vacuum but all proved unsuccessful.

The European scientists Cornelius Drebbel, Robert Fludd, Galileo Galilei and Santorio Santorio
in the 16th and 17th centuries were able to gauge the relative "coldness" or "hotness" of air,
using a rudimentary air thermometer (or thermoscope). This may have been influenced by an
earlier device which could expand and contract the air constructed by Philo of Byzantium and
Hero of Alexandria.

Around 1600, the English philosopher and scientist Francis Bacon surmised: "Heat itself, its
essence and quiddity is motion and nothing else." In 1643, Galileo Galilei, while generally
accepting the 'sucking' explanation of horror vacui proposed by Aristotle, believed that nature’s
vacuum-abhorrence is limited. Pumps operating in mines had already proven that nature would
only fill a vacuum with water up to a height of ~30 feet. Knowing this curious fact, Galileo
encouraged his former pupil Evangelista Torricelli to investigate these supposed limitations.
Torricelli did not believe that vacuum-abhorrence (Horror vacui) in the sense of Aristotle's
'sucking' perspective, was responsible for raising the water. Rather, he reasoned, it was the result
of the pressure exerted on the liquid by the surrounding air.

To prove this theory, he filled a long glass tube (sealed at one end) with mercury and upended it
into a dish also containing mercury. Only a portion of the tube emptied (as shown adjacent);
~30 inches of the liquid remained. As the mercury emptied, and a vacuum was created at the top
of the tube. This, the first man-made vacuum, effectively disproved Aristotle’s 'sucking' theory
and affirmed the existence of vacuums in nature. The gravitational force on the heavy element
that is Mercury prevented it from filling the vacuum. Nature may abhor a vacuum, but gravity
does not care.

Birth of thermodynamics as a modern science

At its origins, thermodynamics was the study of engines. A precursor of the engine was designed
by the German scientist Otto von Guericke who, in 1650, designed and built the world's first
vacuum pump and created the world's first ever vacuum known as the Magdeburg hemispheres.
He was driven to make a vacuum in order to disprove Aristotle's long-held supposition that
'Nature abhors a vacuum'.

Shortly thereafter, Irish physicist and chemist Robert Boyle had learned of Guericke's designs
and in 1656, in coordination with English scientist Robert Hooke, built an air pump. Using this
pump, Boyle and Hooke noticed the pressure-volume correlation: P.V=constant. In that time, air
was assumed to be a system of motionless particles, and not interpreted as a system of moving
molecules. The concept of thermal motion came two centuries later. Therefore Boyle's
publication in 1660 speaks about a mechanical concept: the air spring.[2] Later, after the invention
of the thermometer, the property temperature could be quantified. This tool gave Gay-Lussac the
opportunity to derive his law, which led shortly later to the ideal gas law. But, already before the
establishment of the ideal gas law, an associate of Boyle's named Denis Papin built in 1679 a
bone digester, which is a closed vessel with a tightly fitting lid that confines steam until a high
pressure is generated.

Later designs implemented a steam release valve to keep the machine from exploding. By
watching the valve rhythmically move up and down, Papin conceived of the idea of a piston and
cylinder engine. He did not however follow through with his design. Nevertheless, in 1697,
based on Papin’s designs, engineer Thomas Savery built the first engine. Although these early
engines were crude and inefficient, they attracted the attention of the leading scientists of the
time. One such scientist was Sadi Carnot, the “father of thermodynamics”, who in 1824
published “Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire”, a discourse on heat, power, and engine
efficiency. This marks the start of thermodynamics as a modern science.

A Watt steam engine, the steam engine that propelled the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the
world

Hence, prior to 1698 and the invention of the Savery Engine, horses were used to power pulleys,
attached to buckets, which lifted water out of flooded salt mines in England. In the years to
follow, more variations of steam engines were built, such as the Newcomen Engine, and later the
Watt Engine. In time, these early engines would eventually be utilized in place of horses. Thus,
each engine began to be associated with a certain amount of "horse power" depending upon how
many horses it had replaced. The main problem with these first engines was that they were slow
and clumsy, converting less than 2% of the input fuel into useful work. In other words, large
quantities of coal (or wood) had to be burned to yield only a small fraction of work output.
Hence the need for a new science of engine dynamics was born.Sadi Carnot (1796-1832): the
"father" of thermodynamics

Most cite Sadi Carnot’s 1824 paper Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire as the starting point
for thermodynamics as a modern science. Carnot defined "motive power" to be the expression of
the useful effect that a motor is capable of producing. Herein, Carnot introduced us to the first
modern day definition of "work": weight lifted through a height. The desire to understand, via
formulation, this useful effect in relation to "work" is at the core of all modern day
thermodynamics.

In 1843, James Joule experimentally found the mechanical equivalent of heat. In 1845, Joule
reported his best-known experiment, involving the use of a falling weight to spin a paddle-wheel
in an barrel of water, which allowed him to estimate a mechanical equivalent of heat of
819 ft·lbf/Btu (4.41 J/cal). This led to the theory of conservation of energy and explained why
heat can do a work.[3]

The name "thermodynamics," however, did not arrive until some twenty-five years later when, in
1849, the British mathematician and physicist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) coined the term
thermodynamics in a paper on the efficiency of steam engines.

In 1850, the famed mathematical physicist Rudolf Clausius defined the term entropy S to be the
heat lost or turned into waste, stemming from the Greek word entrepein meaning to turn.

In association with Clausius, in 1871, a Scottish mathematician and physicist James Clerk
Maxwell formulated a new branch of thermodynamics called Statistical Thermodynamics, which
functions to analyze large numbers of particles at equilibrium, i.e., systems where no changes are
occurring, such that only their average properties as temperature T, pressure P, and volume V
become important.

Soon thereafter, in 1875, the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann formulated a precise
connection between entropy S and molecular motion:

being defined in terms of the number of possible states [W] such motion could occupy, where k
is the Boltzmann's constant.

The following year, 1876, was a seminal point in the development of human thought. During this
essential period, chemical engineer Willard Gibbs, the first person in America to be awarded a
PhD in engineering (Yale), published an obscure 300-page paper titled: On the Equilibrium of
Heterogeneous Substances, wherein he formulated one grand equality, the Gibbs free energy
equation, which gives a measure the amount of "useful work" attainable in reacting systems.
Gibbs also originated the concept we now know as enthalpy H, calling it "a heat function for
constant pressure".[4] The modern word enthalpy would be coined many years later by Heike
Kamerlingh Onnes,[5] who based it on the Greek word enthalpein meaning to warm.

Building on these foundations, those as Lars Onsager, Erwin Schrödinger, and Ilya Prigogine,
and others, functioned to bring these engine "concepts" into the thoroughfare of almost every
modern-day branch of science.

[edit] Kinetic theory

Main article: Kinetic theory

The idea that heat is a form of motion is perhaps an ancient one and is certainly discussed by
Francis Bacon in 1620 in his Novum Organum. The first written scientific reflection on the
microscopic nature of heat is probably to be found in a work by Mikhail Lomonosov, in which
he wrote:

"(..) movement should not be denied based on the fact it is not seen. Who would deny
that the leaves of trees move when rustled by a wind, despite it being unobservable from
large distances? Just as in this case motion remains hidden due to perspective, it remains
hidden in warm bodies due to the extremely small sizes of the moving particles. In both
cases, the viewing angle is so small that neither the object nor their movement can be
seen."

During the same years, Daniel Bernoulli published his book Hydrodynamics (1738), in which he
derived an equation for the pressure of a gas considering the collisions of its atoms with the walls
of a container. He proves that this pressure is two thirds the average kinetic energy of the gas in a
unit volume. Bernoulli's ideas, however, made little impact on the dominant caloric culture.
Bernoulli made a connection with Gottfried Leibniz's vis viva principle, an early formulation of
the principle of conservation of energy, and the two theories became intimately entwined
throughout their history. Though Benjamin Thompson suggested that heat was a form of motion
as a result of his experiments in 1798, no attempt was made to reconcile theoretical and
experimental approaches, and it is unlikely that he was thinking of the vis viva principle.

John Herapath later independently formulated a kinetic theory in 1820, but mistakenly associated
temperature with momentum rather than vis viva or kinetic energy. His work ultimately failed
peer review and was neglected. John James Waterston in 1843 provided a largely accurate
account, again independently, but his work received the same reception, failing peer review even
from someone as well-disposed to the kinetic principle as Davy.

Further progress in kinetic theory started only in the middle of the 19th century, with the works
of Rudolf Clausius, James Clerk Maxwell, and Ludwig Boltzmann. In his 1857 work On the
nature of the motion called heat, Clausius for the first time clearly states that heat is the average
kinetic energy of molecules. This interested Maxwell, who in 1859 derived the momentum
distribution later named after him. Boltzmann subsequently generalized his distribution for the
case of gases in external fields.

Boltzmann is perhaps the most significant contributor to kinetic theory, as he introduced many of
the fundamental concepts in the theory. Besides the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution mentioned
above, he also associated the kinetic energy of particles with their degrees of freedom. The
Boltzmann equation for the distribution function of a gas in non-equilibrium states is still the
most effective equation for studying transport phenomena in gases and metals. By introducing
the concept of thermodynamic probability as the number of microstates corresponding to the
current macrostate, he showed that its logarithm is proportional to entropy.

Entropy and the second law

Main article: History of entropy

Even though he was working with the caloric theory, Sadi Carnot in 1824 suggested that some of
the caloric available for generating useful work is lost in any real process. In March 1851, while
grappling to come to terms with the work of James Prescott Joule, Lord Kelvin started to
speculate that there was an inevitable loss of useful heat in all processes. The idea was framed
even more dramatically by Hermann von Helmholtz in 1854, giving birth to the spectre of the
heat death of the universe.

In 1854, William John Macquorn Rankine started to make use in calculation of what he called
his thermodynamic function. This has subsequently been shown to be identical to the concept of
entropy formulated by Rudolf Clausius in 1865. Clausius used the concept to develop his classic
statement of the second law of thermodynamics the same year.

[edit] Heat transfer

Main article: Heat transfer

The phenomenon of heat conduction is immediately grasped in everyday life. In 1701, Sir Isaac
Newton published his law of cooling. However, in the 17th century, it came to be believed that
all materials had an identical conductivity and that differences in sensation arose from their
different heat capacities.

Suggestions that this might not be the case came from the new science of electricity in which it
was easily apparent that some materials were good electrical conductors while others were
effective insulators. Jan Ingen-Housz in 1785-9 made some of the earliest measurements, as did
Benjamin Thompson during the same period.

The fact that warm air rises and the importance of the phenomenon to meteorology was first
realised by Edmund Halley in 1686. Sir John Leslie observed that the cooling effect of a stream
of air increased with its speed, in 1804.

Carl Wilhelm Scheele distinguished heat transfer by thermal radiation (radiant heat) from that by
convection and conduction in 1777. In 1791, Pierre Prévost showed that all bodies radiate heat,
no matter how hot or cold they are. In 1804, Leslie observed that a matt black surface radiates
heat more effectively than a polished surface, suggesting the importance of black body radiation.
Though it had become to be suspected even from Scheele's work, in 1831 Macedonio Melloni
demonstrated that black body radiation could be reflected, refracted and polarised in the same
way as light.

James Clerk Maxwell's 1862 insight that both light and radiant heat were forms of
electromagnetic wave led to the start of the quantitative analysis of thermal radiation. In 1879,
Jožef Stefan observed that the total radiant flux from a blackbody is proportional to the fourth
power of its temperature and stated the Stefan-Boltzmann law. The law was derived theoretically
by Ludwig Boltzmann in 1884.