Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 17
 great text September 14, 2008
Lance B. Sjogren (San Pedro, Ca United States)
9 out of 10 found this review helpful
I took a course in Thermo as an undergrad, but I basically just learned how to solve the textbook problems to the point where I was able to pass the tests, but I never got a good intuitive understanding of the subject.
My major was EE so one term of Thermo was a required course but not in the mainstream of my studies, so I never needed to understand it in any greater depth.
I recently retired from my career as an EE and have been wanting to become more knowledgable about energy, since I think it is probably the toughest science/engineering issue facing society for the forseeable future.
It dawned on me at some point that if I want to be knowledgable about energy, I need to do more than just read books about energy sources, I need to have a decent grounding in those technical disciplines that energy technologies are based on. The most obvious was Thermodynamics, although I decided I should also beef up my Chemistry.
And I realized, by golly, I can learn this stuff, because of my engineering background and the fact that I'm not too old for my brain to be decomposing too badly so far.
For the moment, I am studying this book on Thermo.
I am really happy with this book. They really cover the material with a lot of rigor and give a ton of examples which really help get an intuitive understanding of what the concepts mean for practical systems.
I haven't finished the book, but am far enough along to be able to judge it. Right now I'm in the chapter on Exergy. I don't believe we ever got into that in the 1st term Thermo I took 30 years ago or so. The Exergy concept really makes a lot of sense in tying everything together and providing a comprehensive approach toward evaluating the efficiency of a particular system.
I do wonder about the notation, though. They denote exergy with an "E", which seems like it could lead to its being mixed up with energy.
Wikipedia says that Exergy is denoted by the letter "B". Not sure where that came from but it seems like a good idea to use a completely different letter for it.
Aside from some minor issues like that, this book seems outstanding to me. I gather it is the predominant textbook for thermo these days. I would say it deserves that status.
I am really looking forward to the later chapters I haven't gotten to yet on the various types of engines and turbos and whatnot.
For the material to really sink in, I know I will need to read the book a second time, but the second pass should go quite a bit faster than the first.
Great book March 18, 2008
ME student
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a very good text book, it is well written and keeps it short and sweet. It gets to the point. One great feature is that it boxes in derivations that are not nessacary to understand, this way you don't get bogged down in a lot of text. There are tons of examples in the book and no mistakes that I could find. You really can read and understand everything from the text, you don't really need a teacher, which is saying alot, because most books are impossible to read and figure out what's going on. I agree the bio part is worthless, but Moran is obviously into that stuff because he always mentioned it in class. It's really not a bad thing...just skip it, who cares if it's in there. Overall if you want a good thermo book, whether it's self taught or in a class, it's a good choice.
Thorough introductory thermodynamics book for engineers July 5, 2009
Ameatball (Chicago, IL)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is indeed a very easy to read/understand thermodynamics book. I am a biomedical engineering undergraduate student with a solid background in calculus (up to multivariable) and differential equations. You don't need differential equations to grasp this text, but I would definitely say you need calculus to fully understand everything. In my opinion, the authors present all of the information very clearly. As a biomedical engineering student, I really liked that they had biomedical connections dispersed throughout each chapter that related thermodynamics concepts to biomedical processes.
Good book November 10, 2009
Morley (LA, CA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a good undergraduate level book for mechanical engineers (I feel chemical engineers will find this book useless).
I had really good professors for thermodynamics so I might not be the best person to review the book since I understood all what we needed to know. the basic stuff is explained well (1st and 2nd laws, P-v/T-s diagrams, otto/diesel, brayton, rankin, combined cycles, what individual components do, exergy) however, I found some of the topics that a lot of undergraduate classes don't really cover aren't presented in great detail. mostly things dealing with mass transfer (cooling towers, combustion, psychro) I didn't really understand what the hell was going on until i took a mass transfer class.
but i like it. this one time I went to las vegas to marry this book but they said I can't because the book didn't have an ID.
Engineering made easy September 25, 2009
gigi
Out of all the physics and engineering books I have had to read during the past four years, this is by far the best when it comes to breaking down what can end up being difficult concepts to wrap your head around. The book not only breaks each method and theory down into words, they also highlight necessary formulas at the end of the chapter and have extensive examples that they guide you through at different points during each chapter.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 17
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