How are energy heat and work related?

1 Answer
May 30, 2015

Heat and work are intimately related to each other as suggested the first time by J.P. Joule.

What is found is that, when we do some work on a system, its internal energy increases. In simple words, the thermal energy of the constituent particles increase and this increase is always found to be equal to the amount of work done on the system.

It was also found that, no matter how (what external agents we use) we do work on a system, when the amount of work done is a constant, the rise in internal energy is the same in all cases, and is in fact equal to the work done.