High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! In thermodynamics, the term thermodynamic free energy refers to the amount of work that can be extracted from a system, and is helpful in engineering applications. It is a subtraction of the entropy of a system multiplied by a reference temperature (giving the "unusable energy") from the total energy, yielding a thermodynamic state function which represents the "useful energy". In short, free energy is that portion of any First-Law energy that is available for doing thermodynamic work; i.e., work mediated by thermal energy. Since free energy is subject to irreversible loss in the course of such work and First-Law energy is always conserved, it is evident that free energy is an expendable, Second-Law kind of energy that can make things happen within finite amounts of time. The free energy functions are Legendre transforms of the internal energy.