<p>Hi,
I am taking Thermo I right now and the subject matter seems to be really confusing. Moreover, the book that I use(intro to Chem Eng thermo by vann ness) is not very useful. It just writes the formula instead of deriving it from the beginning . Does anyone have a better "trick" to do well in that class ? I know its supposed to be a hard class. But there should be a way to crack it.</p>
<p>Thanks alot!</p>
<p>Thermo is already a complicated subject. For the first part of thermo, I recommend you to know the laws of thermodynamics really well because many formulas were derived from those. Later on, learn how to do maxwell’s equations. As you go higher, new equations will appear and these don’t really make sense because they were created to correlate with experimental data so make sure you know how to manipulate and use experimental data (graphs, tables, etc.). Another thing, as cheme undergrad they will not likely explain to you how did thermodynamics develop (like what is entropy really?) unless you take statistical mechanics so don’t try too hard to understand it 100% just learn how to manipulate it.</p>
<p>Thanks for the suggestion.
Do you know any other book that’s better at explaining the formula and derivations than the one by van ness?</p>
<p>For a quick review on cycles/applications look at Moran and Shapiro.</p>
<p>While it might be a little bit more difficult I think that Callen’s Thermodynamics is the classical thermodynamic text.</p>