Adiabat Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-25
An adiabat is a curve representing a quasistatic adiabatic change. In a reversible description it is also a curve of constant entropy. For an ideal gas with constant heat-capacity ratio , it obeys . A general irreversible adiabatic process need not follow this equilibrium-state curve and can produce entropy.
A heat engine's thermal efficiency is net work out divided by heat absorbed,
where both heat quantities are positive magnitudes. The last equality follows from the first law over a complete cycle.
Use moles of an ideal gas with constant molar and . For the Otto cycle, reversible adiabats give and . Isochoric heat input and rejection are and . Therefore
The denominator's temperature difference is times the numerator's difference.
For the ideal Atkinson cycle, heating at fixed volume gives . The longer expansion ends when . Combining the adiabatic pressure–temperature relation with yields
Also for . The PDF asks explicitly for ; the transcription additionally names , which is supplied above too.
Heat input remains , while the isobaric return rejects . Hence the Atkinson efficiency advantage from extended expansion is quantified by
Compare cycles with the same initial state, compression ratio and heat input. The extra expansion and constant-pressure return enclose positive extra work,
It uses heat that the Otto cycle would reject, while is unchanged. Equivalently, concavity gives , so for under this matched comparison. This is an ideal-cycle result; the question's named real-engine application is not needed to establish it.
Figure 1.
Original ideal-gas cycle calculation showing the extra expansion work and the matched Otto–Atkinson efficiency comparison
. Details.
Label the initial state 1, the end of compression 2, the end of constant-pressure heating 3, and the end of adiabatic expansion 4. The volume sequence is , with . The Diesel cycle has a compression adiabat , a horizontal constant-pressure heat-input segment , an expansion adiabat , and a vertical constant-volume cooling segment .
Figure 1. . Original dimensionless example with V2/V1=0.2, V3/V1=0.4 and gamma=1.4. The curved segments are reversible adiabats, the upper horizontal segment adds heat at fixed pressure and the right vertical segment rejects heat at fixed volume. The enclosed area is the positive net work output. Details.
For an ideal gas, a reversible adiabat obeys , so it falls more steeply than an isotherm. The expansion adiabat lies above the compression adiabat at equal volume between and , giving a clockwise cycle with positive work output.
For , Taylor expansion gives . The vanishing-cutoff limit of the Diesel cycle is
The maximum temperature tends to , while the minimum stays at . A Carnot engine between those limiting extrema has
so the limiting efficiencies coincide. At exactly , however, both heat input and net work vanish, and the cycle retraces its compression adiabat. The efficiency there is an undefined ; the boxed value is the continuous limit for neighbouring nonzero cycles, not finite work at zero heat input.
For a finite cutoff ratio , the Carnot comparison uses , giving . The Diesel cycle has smaller efficiency. For example,
which makes its rejected/input heat ratio larger than the Carnot ratio.
For a reversible adiabatic change, , equivalently . Substitute :
Integration, with fixed positive reference values , gives
Since and ,
The relation applies to the quasistatic reversible adiabat. Adiabatic heat isolation alone does not enforce it for an irreversible process which generates entropy. The shifted volume , rather than itself, is the appropriate coordinate in this model.
Take the convection to maintain a dry, nearly reversible adiabat, with specific gas constant . Hydrostatic equilibrium and an ideal-gas equation of state will be used separately to convert pressure to height. For an adiabatic displacement, the first law of thermodynamics in enthalpy form gives
The adiabat with linear heat capacity follows by integrating from the surface: this gives the monotone implicit temperature–pressure relation
An explicit form, using the positive real Lambert W branch, is
As , . At fixed ,
Larger heat capacity therefore keeps the upper atmosphere warmer at the same pressure. Equivalently becomes smaller. The original normalized sketch below shows the resulting family of profiles; no particular gas constants or surface temperature are assumed there.
The height equations are
Integrating the latter gives
The physically selected root starts at and decreases. Its formal upper boundary is
At that height and . The limit is . This finite-height zero is a property of the assumed polytropic-like model, not a claim that a real atmosphere reaches absolute zero: molecular heat capacities, composition, transport and the continuum ideal-gas description cease to support that extrapolation.
Figure 1.
Adiabats with increasing heat capacity and the limited-temperature latent heat inferred from an Antoine fit
. Original calculations. Adiabats use dimensionless parameters and ; the latent-heat plot distinguishes the stated fit range from an invalid extrapolation toward the known critical point. Details.
Let be the remaining absorber optical depth, and retain the mixture's convective exponent . The outgoing surface contribution is . To first order, atmospheric emission is the column-mean source times . If , the adiabat gives , a source linear in mass/optical depth. Therefore its mean is , or equivalently it is evaluated at :
Setting this equal to gives
The zero-opacity limit correctly gives , while a small positive opacity raises the surface temperature slightly. The expression is a first-order thin-column result, not a formula to extend to its apparent pole at . More generally, direct thin-column averaging gives ; the half-column value is exact at this order when . The assumed convective thermal structure remains a modelling condition even when the gas becomes radiatively thin.
Assume an ideal gas dominated by carbon dioxide, constant mean molar heat capacity , and a dry convective adiabat connecting the stated emitting layer to the ground. Conservation of entropy gives , where is the universal molar gas constant. Thus
The estimate extrapolates across a pressure ratio of . It neglects radiatively stable layers, variable heat capacity, departures from an ideal gas and changes in composition; these approximations limit its accuracy. A brightness temperature observed from space cannot generally be equated to a unique material level, but this calculation uses the layer interpretation explicitly supplied by the question.