Question

How do you calculate work from a pv diagram?

Answer 1

Please see below.

Explanation:

Let us look at a typical PV diagram. It appears as following in which Pressure is on `y`-axis and Volume is on `x`-axis.

Work can be calculated as the area of the closed curve `"1234"`, the grey shaded portion and mathematically we can describe it as

`oint" "PdV`