On some inconsistences between two accepted approaches to treat reversible thermal cycles

Abstract

Abstract In many engineering thermodynamics textbooks, for solving reversible thermal cycles such as Otto and Joule-Bryton ones, commonly a kind of hybrid approach is used. On one hand an ideal gas is used as working fluid, but on the other hand, some thermal properties as heat capacities and their ratio are taken from data tables corresponding to imperfect gases. This approach leads to contradictions with the true reversible formalism. In this work, we analyse two examples treated in some thermodynamics textbooks where we show some inconsistences in the solutions of the problems.