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jdstokes
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Homework Statement
A cylinder contains one liter of air at room termperature and atmospheric pressure. At one end of the cylinder is a massless piston, whose surface area is 0.01 m^2. Suppose that you push the piston _very_ suddenly, exerting a force of 2 kN. The piston moves only one millimeter, before it is stopped by an immovable barrier of some sort.
Use the thermodynamic identity to calculate the change in the entropy of the gas (once it has again reached equilibrium)
Homework Equations
[itex]dU = TdS - PdV[/itex]
The Attempt at a Solution
Very sudden processes can be assumed adiabatic. The pressure at the beginning and the end is atmospheric, therefore rearranging the thermodynamic identity gives
[itex]dS = \frac{-P_\mathrm{atm}A d\ell + dQ}{T} = 0.003 \mathrm{J/K}[/itex].
My concern here is that since the process is non-quasistatic, that the thermodynamic identity does not hold.
Is it possible to apply the thermodynamic identity to processes which begin and end in equilibrium, but are non-quasistatic in between?