ABSTRACT

Concise yet thorough, accessible, authoritative, and affordable. These are the hallmarks of books in the remarkable Physics and its Applications series.

Thermodynamics is an essential part of any physical sciences education, but it is so full of pitfalls and subtleties, that many students fail to appreciate its elegance and power. In Thermal Physics, the author emphasizes understanding the basic ideas and shows how the important thermodynamics results can be simply obtained from the fundamental relations without getting lost in a maze of partial differentials.

In this second edition, Dr. Finn incorporated new sections on scales of temperature, availability, the degradation of energy, and lattice defects. The text contains ample illustrations and examples of applications of thermodynamics in physics, engineering, and chemistry.

chapter 1|15 pages

Temperature

chapter 2|18 pages

Reversible processes and work

chapter 3|17 pages

The first law of thermodynamics

chapter 4|19 pages

The second law of thermodynamics

chapter 5|26 pages

Entropy

chapter 7|18 pages

Some general thermodynamic relations

chapter 9|20 pages

Change of phase

chapter 10|12 pages

Open systems and the chemical potential

chapter 11|12 pages

The third law of thermodynamics