Winterbone D.E., Turan A. Advanced Thermodynamics for Engineers

Second Edition. — Elsevier Ltd., 2015. — 556 p.The engineer is essentially concerned with manufacturing devices to enable tasks to be performed cost-effectively and efficiently. Engineering has produced a new generation of automatic ‘slaves’ which enable those in the developed countries to maintain their lifestyle by the consumption of fuels rather than by manual labour. The developing countries still rely to a large extent on ‘manpower’, but the pace of development is such that the whole world wishes to have the machines and quality of life which we, in the developed countries, take for granted: this is a major challenge to the engineer, and particularly the thermodynamicist. The reason why the thermodynamicist plays a key role in this scenario is because the methods of converting any form of energy into power are the domain of thermodynamics: all of these processes obey the four laws of thermodynamics, and their efficiency is controlled by the second law. The emphasis of the early years of an undergraduate course is on the first law of thermodynamics, which is simply the conservation of energy; the first law does not give any information on the quality of the energy. It is the hope of the author that this text will introduce the concept of the quality of energy and help future engineers use our resources more efficiently. Ironically, some of the largest demands for energy may come from cooling (e.g. refrigeration and airconditioning) as the developing countries in the tropical regions become wealthier – this might require a more basic way of considering energy utilisation than that emphasised in current thermodynamic texts. This book attempts to introduce basic concepts which should apply over the whole range of new technologies covered by engineering thermodynamics. It considers new approaches to cycles, which enable their irreversibility to be taken into account; a detailed study of combustion to show how the chemical energy in a fuel is converted into thermal energy and emissions; an analysis of fuel cells to give an understanding of the direct conversion of chemical energy to electrical power; a detailed study of property relationships to enable more sophisticated analyses to be made of both high and low temperature plant; and irreversible thermodynamics, whose principles might hold a key to new ways of efficiently converting energy to power (e.g. solar energy, fuel cells).