Internal energy

From SklogWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

The internal energy of a system is given by the sum of the kinetic energy and the potential energy. This excludes the external energy of the system, for example motion of the center of mass of the system, or the presence of an external field.

The internal energy in classical thermodynamics is given by

and in statistical mechanics by

where is the Helmholtz energy function and is the partition function.