[Physics] Thermodynamics: Are pressure and temperature enough to calculate enthalpy

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From the chart above, it looks like it is possible to calculate enthalpy from just pressure and temperature. After a few hours of Googling my question, I'm not able to find anything helpful.

My company is interested in finding the effectiveness of an air conditioning system by measuring the change in enthalpy from one side to the other. As a software person, I need a formula that I can use to calculate the enthalpy. I know this formula would need to include different properties of the gas, can you elaborate on what those constants are? Thank you very much.

Best Answer

The formula that you are looking for is $$H=H_0+ \int_0^\rho \frac{[P-T(\frac{\partial P}{\partial T})_{\rho}]}{\rho^2} d\rho + \frac{P}{\rho} - RT + \frac52R(T-T_0) $$ But this is useless to you unless you know the equation of state of your substance (if you have vapor and liquid, it is not $Pv=RT$) and the reference value $H_0$ which is attained at $T_0$. In the formula above $T$ is temperature, $P$ is pressure, $\rho$ is density (the equation of state is a relationship among these three parameters, so only two of them are independent) and $R$ is 8.31 J/mol K - the universal gas constant.

Pressure and temperature are sufficient to compute any state variable, including enthalpy, provided you have a single chemical component (for example pure water, or pure nitrogen, or pure gold) and a single phase (gas only or liquid only or solid only, i.e. no boiling, melting, etc.) system. Moreover, for ideal gas (the kind where $Pv=RT$) temperature alone determines enthalpy (in the formula above all the terms with $P$ in them will drop out in this case), i.e. $H$ is pressure-independent. But if you have more than one component or more than one phase (the case in the diagram shown), you need to specify chemical and/or phase make-up of your system to fix the thermodynamics.

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