Abstract

The concatenation of one cycle in the operation of a reversible heat engine with that process in which the engine’s work output is irreversibly degraded into heat at the temperature of the cold reservoir, transforms the effects of the former into a couple of irreversible heat transfers. One of these heat transfers is found to be credited, via thermodynamic-sanctioned procedures, with two different entropy changes. A logical analysis centered on the principle of contradiction rejects one of these entropy changes as well as the thermodynamic notion leading to it. The rejected notion, the one assigning a zero entropy change to the heat-to-work transformation, brings to light a counterexample to the second law of thermodynamics in the form of an isothermal and reversible process with a different from zero total entropy change.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.