In the physical sciences, an intensive property (also called a bulk property), is a physical property of a system that does not depend on the system size or the amount of material in the system: it is scale invariant. By contrast, an extensive property of a system does depend on the system size or the amount of material in the system. (see: examples) Some intensive properties, such as viscosity, are empirical macroscopic quantities and are not relevant to extremely small systems.

For example, density is an intensive quantity (it does not depend on the quantity), while mass and volume are extensive quantities. Note that the ratio of two extensive quantities that scale in the same way is scale-invariant, and hence an intensive quantity.

Contents

Show All>>

 

The above information uses material from Wikipedia and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Some facts may not have been fully verified for accuracy. [Disclaimers]
This page was last archived by our server on Mon Jan 11 05:21:26 2010. [ refresh local cache ]
Displaying this page or its contents does not use any Wikimedia Foundation's resources.
The owners of this site proudly support the Wikimedia Foundation.