The Quasistatic process reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Quasistatic process

In thermodynamics a quasistatic process is a process that is performed in such a way as to ensure that the system goes through a sequence of states whose distance from equilibrium is infinitesimal.

A process of this kind is reversible, that is the net variation of entropy of the system and of the environment sums to zero.

In practice we can approximate a quasistatic process by performing it very slowly.

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