PDM Legendre Transformations
Highlights of the activity
- This small group activity is designed to help students learn about Legendre transformations and thermodynamic potentials.
- Students work in small groups to investigate ways of describing a system as a function of different variables.
- The whole class wrap-up discussion emphasizes the need for Legendre transformations and thermodynamic potentials on the PDM and their connections to their thermodynamic counterparts.
Reasons to spend class time on the activity
This activity helps to motivate both the need for different thermodynamic potentials and the mechanism of Legendre transformations from which these potentials are obtained. As will all activities that use the PDM, this activity affords students the opportunity to tactilely explore a concept that is typically taught abstractly.