Work of breathing Work of breathing Work of breathing (WOB) is the energy expended to inhale and exhale a breathing gas. It is usually expressed as work per unit volume, for example, joules/litre, or as a work rate (power), such as joules/min or equivalent units, as it is not particularly useful without a reference to volume or time. It can be calculated in terms of the pulmonary pressure multiplied by the change in pulmonary volume, or in terms of the oxygen consumption attributable to breathing. In a normal resting state the work of breathing constitutes about 5% of the total body oxygen consumption.
Conservation of energy the heat energy may be written where formula_21 is the temperature and formula_22 is a small change in the entropy of the system. Temperature and entropy are variables of state of a system. If an open system (in which mass may be exchanged with the environment) has several walls such that the mass transfer is through rigid walls separate from the heat and work transfers, then the first law may be written: where formula_24 is the added mass and formula_25 is the internal energy per unit mass of the added mass, measured in the surroundings before the process. The conservation