REFRIGERANTS
Sadi Carnot: father of thermodynamics
Professor Dick Powell of Refrigerant Solutions sheds a light on the works of Sadi Carnot.
T
he technology of the refrigeration and HVAC industries is underpinned by Thermodynamics, one of the great
intellectual scientifi c achievements of the 19th Century. It is therefore fi tting that we should pay tribute in 2024 to one of its founding fathers, the French engineer, Sadi Carnot, to mark the bicentenary of his monograph, ‘Refl ections sur la puissance mortice du feu’, one of the most important scientifi c works ever published. It can be ranked alongside the distinguished works of Newton, Darwin, Planck, Einstein, Planck and other great scientists whose ideas have fashioned our modern world. Every undergraduate engineer, chemist and physicist learns about Carnot’s work, but I must admit that I found thermodynamic lectures boring, full of partial diff erential integrals whose application to the chemistry that interested me, seemed at best limited. My attitude changed when, a decade after graduating and by then working in industry, I was moved to a new, HFC refrigerants project and began to appreciate that thermodynamics was fundamental both to their manufacture and their applications. A fascinating aspect of Carnot’s paper is that he starts by describing the economic and political impacts of the steam engine in the early 19th
Dick Powell
century, powering forges, mines, ships and the manufacturing industries. He pays especial tribute to ‘England’ as the ‘birthplace’ of the steam engine and its application to industry, honouring Savery, Newcomen, Smeaton, Woolf, Trevithick and ‘the famous Watt’. Carnot recognises that England’s political and economic standing was derived from the ‘colossal’ power of steam perhaps more so than her much-vaunted navy. But he notes that in spite of empirical work of these engineers to develop the steam engine
22 November 2023 •
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