Benoit Paul Émile Clapeyron

Benoit Paul Émile Clapeyron (February 26, 1799 - January 28, 1864) was an French engineer and physicist, one of the founders of thermodynamics.

Life

Born in Paris, Clapeyron studied at the École polytechnique and the École des Mines, before leaving for Saint Petersburg in 1820 to teach at the École des Travaux Publics. He returned to Paris only after the Revolution of July 1830, supervising the construction of the first railway line connecting Paris to Versailles and Saint-Germain.

Work

Thermodynamics

In 1834, he made his first contribution to the creation of modern thermodynamics by publishing a report entitled the Driving force of the heat, in which it developed the work of the physicist Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, deceased two years before. Though Carnot had developed a compelling anaysis of a generalised heat engine, he had employed the clumsy and already unfashionable caloric theory.

Clapeyron, in his memoire, presented Carnot's work in a more accessible and analytic graphical form, showing the Carnot cycle as a closed curve on an indicator diagram, a chart of pressure against volume.

In 1843, Clapeyron further developed the idea of a reversible process, already suggested by Carnot and made a definitive statement of Carnot's principle, what is now known as the second law of thermodynamics.

These foundations enabled him to make substantive extensions of Clausius' work, including the formula, now known as the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, which characterises the phase transition between two phases of matter. He further considered questions of phase transitions in what later became known as Stefan problems.

Other work

Clapeyron also worked on the characterisation of perfect gases, the equilibrium of homogeneous solids, and calculations of the statics of beams.

Honors

Member of the Académie des Sciences, (1858).
The Rue Clapeyron in Paris' 8th arrondissement is named for him.
He is one of The 72 names on the Eiffel Tower.

1799 births | 1864 deaths | French physicists | Alumni of the École Polytechnique

External links