Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron

Benoît Paul Émile Clapeyron (February 26, 1799 - January 28, 1864) was a 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

To understand the significance of Clapeyron's work in the context of the timeline Edit

In 1834, he made his first contribution to the creation of modern thermodynamics by publishing a report entitled the Driving force of the heat (Puissance motrice de la chaleur), in which it developed the work of the physicist caloric theory.

Clapeyron, in his memoire, presented Carnot's work in a more accessible and analytic graphical form, showing the pressure against volume (named in his honor Clapeyron's graph).

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 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 beams.

Publications

Clapeyron E. (1834), Puissance motrice de la chaleur, Journal de l'École Royale Polytechnique, Vingt-troisième cahier, Tome XIV, 153-190.

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.