MINIMUM WORK TO PRODUCE VACUUM

Statement
Find the minimum work required to evacuate air from a 1 m3 vessel.
Calcular el trabajo mínimo necesario para hacer el vacío en 1 m3 de aire.

Solution. Perhaps the simplest approach is the cylinder-piston arrangement sketched in Fig. 1, in which
the piston is initially at the end of the cylinder, and then to pull the piston back to make the empty
volume.

Fig. 1. Making vacuum within a cylinder-piston device.

It is easy to find the work required to move the piston, against atmospheric pressure, p0, to make room for
Vvacuum=1 m3: W=Fx=p0AV/A=p0V=105∙1=100 kJ.

But that approach seems ad-hoc, without following the general development of exergy. Let us consider
our traditional control-mass approach, and imagine the two states sketched in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2. The internal air withdrawn to an imaginary balloon.

Mass in conserved within the vessel-balloon combined-system (our control mass), and the minimum work
is given by the general expression of the exergy of a system in an infinite environment:

ΔE + p0 ΔV − T0 ΔS
Wu min =

where ∆E=mcv∆T=0 because temperature should be kept unaltered to avoid further expenses, ∆V=V=1
m3 because the combined system doubles its volume from initial to final state, and ∆S=0 because mass m
has the same temperature and pressure in both states. That yields Wu,min=p0V=105∙1=100 kJ, as before. But
with this reasoning we might have doubts, for instance, about the entropy of the vacuum space, which can
be obviated with the following approach.

The problem we intend to solve now is not singular any more (we assumed p=0 for vacuum, and there is a
lnp entropy-term). We consider a small mass of trapped air in a cylinder-piston arrangement as in Fig. 1,
initially occupying a small volume V0=m0RT0/p0 at p0=100 kPa and T0=288 K, which is forced to slowly
expand up to occupy a volume V=1 m3, to which we apply the general expression of the exergy above,
but without singularities:

Minimum work to produce vacuum 1

  T V 
Wu min = ΔE + p0 ΔV − T0 ΔS = m0 c (T1 − T0 ) + p0 (V1 − V0 ) − T0 m0  cv ln 1 + R ln 1  =
 T0 V0 
pV  V  V0 →0 V V
= 0 + p0 (V − V0 ) − 0 0  0 + R ln 1   → p0V − p0V lim  0 ln =  p0V
R  V0  →
V0 0
 V V0 

where the limit for the initial volume V0→0 has clearly shown that the entropy term is of the form xlnx
with x→0, which tends to zero itself (recall L’Hopital’s rule: if lim(f’(x))/(g’(x))=L, then
lim(f(x))/(g(x))=lim(f’(x))/(g’(x))= L).

Comments. We have taken here the extreme model of assuming absolute vacuum; in practice there will
always remain some gas, at least the sublimated vapours from the wall materials. With present vacuum-
pump technology, it is very hard to go down below 10-5 Pa (ten orders of magnitude below normal
atmospheric pressure), and 10-9 Pa seems to be the practical limit nowadays.

Notice that the assumption that minimum work is needed for an isothermal process follows from the goal
of minimising the kinetic energy supplied to the external air by the piston motion.

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Minimum work to produce vacuum 2