Re: Obvious Violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Countless materials reversibly contract and then swell as a chemical agent (e.g. hydrogen ions) is added to and then removed from the system:

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Illustration-of-a-volume-transition-in-a-cross-linked-polybase-network-triggered-by-a-pH_fig1_47426820

These materials can, in principle, convert ambient heat into work cyclically and isothermally, in violation of the second law of thermodynamics. Here are two illustrations of how, by adding and removing hydrogen ions (H+), one can extract work from pH-sensitive polymers:

Figure 4 here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1367611/pdf/biophysj00645-0017.pdf

Figure 16A here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/jp972167t.

Adding and removing H+, per se, consumes no work if done QUASISTATICALLY. This means that the work lost e.g. in adding is compensated by the work gained in removing, and the net work involved is zero. So lifting a weight is the net work extracted from the cycle. The second law of thermodynamics is clearly violated.

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Pentcho Valev