Title: Heat Transfer During the Piston-Cylinder Expansion of a Gas

The expansion of a gas within a piston-cylinder arrangement is studied in order to obtain a better understanding of the heat transfer which occurs during this process. While the situation of heat transfer during the expansion of a gas has received considerable attention, the process is still not very well understood. In particular, the time dependence of heat transfer has not been well studied, with many researchers instead focused on average heat transfer rates. Additionally, many of the proposed models are not in agreement with each other and are usually dependent on experimentally determined coefficients which have been found to vary widely between test geometries and operating conditions. Therefore, the expansion process is analyzed in order to determine a model for the time dependence of heat transfer during the expansion. A model is developed for the transient heat transfer by assuming that the expansion behaves in a polytropic manner. This leads to a heat transfer model written in terms of an unknown polytropic exponent, n. By examining the physical significance of this parameter, it is proposed that the polytropic exponent can be related to a ratio of the time scales associated with the expansion process, such as a characteristic Peclet number