About the Book

Thermodynamics

Thermodynamics deals with the general principles and laws that govern the behaviour of matter and with the relationships between material properties. The origins of these laws and quantitative values for the properties are provided by statistical mechanics, which analyses the interaction of molecules and provides a detailed description of their behaviour. A physical explanation of entropy based upon the laws of probability is introduced. The free energy and the other thermodynamic potentials of thermo-dynamics are shown simply to be the total entropy of a subsystem and reservoir; their minimisation at equilibrium is nothing but the maximum of the entropy mandated by the second law of thermodynamics and is manifest in the peaked probability distributions of statistical mechanics. CONTENTS : (1) Introduction (2) Heat and Work (3) Statistical Thermodynamics (4) Classical Thermodynamics (5) Laws of Thermodynamics (6) Quantum Mechanics (7) Rotational Dynamics (8) Air Standard Efficiency (9) Boilers.