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what is exactly entropy and what is its significance

what is exactly entropy and what is its significance

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Sunil Kumar FP
askIITians Faculty 183 Points
9 years ago
Entropy in simple terms is the measure of degre of randomness of th system.In case of gas,liquid and solid,gas has maximum entropy as it has maximum randomness.It helps in predicting the feasibility of the reaction.
we have reaction always proceed towards greater entropy.
According to Clausius, the entropy change ΔS of a thermodynamic system absorbing a quantity of heat ΔQ at absolute temperature T is simply the ratio between the two:

ΔS = ΔQ/T
physical significance
1)Entropy is a measure of the disorder or randomness in the system. When a gas expands into vacuum, water flows out of a reservoir, spontaneous chain reaction takes place, an increase in the disorder occurs and therefore entropy increases. Similarly, when a substance is heated or cooled there is also a change in entropy. Thus increase in entropy implies a transition from on ordered to a less ordered state of affair.
2)Why is disorder favoured? This can be answered by considering an example, when a single coin is flipped, there is an equal chance that head or tail will show up. When two coins are flipped, there is a chance of two heads or two tails showing up but there are double chance of occurrence of one head and one tail. This shows that disorder is more frequent than order.
Changes in order are expressed quantitatively in terms of entropy change, Delta S . How are entropy and order in the system related? Since a disordered state is more probable for systems than of order(see figure), the entropy and thermodynamic probabilities are closely related.
deltaG=deltaH -TdeltaS

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