Glossary - T

ternary systems

Three phase systems: e.g. a water, oil and a surfactant.

TFLOPS

Stands for `zillion (Tera) Floating-point Operations Per second'. Usually pronounced and sometimes written as tera-flops. It is used to measure the number of arithmetic operations that a computer can perform in one second -- the very fastest supercomputers at the moment (1998) can do 1 or 2 TFLOPS. See also FLOPS, MFLOPS, GFLOPS.

thermodynamics

Thermodynamics is the study of the conversion of energy between heat and other forms, mechanical in particular. There are many processes that convert energy from one form to another. For example burning wood converts chemical energy (in the wood) to heat; turning a hydroelectric generator converts the kinetic (motion) energy of the water into electrical energy. There are two laws which we can use to help understand processes like these:

• The first law of thermodynamics says that energy is conserved, it is neither created nor destroyed but can change form.
• The second law of thermodynamics says that systems always tend to states of greater disorder -- this is another way to say that the entropy always increases. In terms of energy conversions this means that they can never be 100% efficient. Some portion of the energy involved in a conversion will inevitably be lost to the surroundings as heat.

topology

A sophisticated means of characterizing the geometry of an object. Although a circle and a square have different shapes they have the same topology whereas a disc and a ring although both round have different topology.

topologically different

Two things are said to be topologically different if they have different topologies. It turns out that in many physical systems the topology is very significant and often systems with the same topology are, in some senses, equivalent.

triangulation

A surface made of triangles. If the triangles are small then the surface appears smooth.

trillion

10¹² in scientific notation. You can also write it as a 1 with 12 zeros after it: 1,000,000,000,000 or a million million.

two-dimensional

Something that has only two dimensions, a sheet of paper with no thickness for example.

types of surfactants

They can be divided into 4 categories based on the type of hydrophillic head: anionic, cationic, non-inonic and zwitter-ionic.