The duality of internal energy of ideal gas

This contribution starts with the discussion on the classification of energy, and then the behaviors of various thermodynamic processes are analyzed, accompanying with the comparison of the adiabatic compression process of an ideal gas and an elastic rod. All these analyses show that the internal energy of ideal gases exhibits the duality of thermal energy-mechanical energy, that is, the internal energy acts as the thermal energy during the isochoric process, while the internal energy acts as the mechanical energy during the isentropic process. Such behavior of the internal energy is quite different from other types of energy during the energy conversion process because the internal energy of ideal gases exhibits the duality of thermal energy-mechanical energy. Because of this duality, the internal energy of ideal gas is proposed to be refered to as thermodynamic energy rather than thermal energy as indicated in some literature, although it consists of kinetics of the microscopic random motion of particles and can be expressed as the function of temperature only.