ABSTRACT
Thermodynamics is one of the most powerful tools at our disposal for the study of the sustainability of processes. Although a development that was associated with the invention of the steam engine, it has proved to be of much wider application in the fields of chemistry, ecology, biochemistry, cosmology and information theory. If we wish to understand anything about the sustainability of a process, it is clearly important to know about energy use, recycling and other facets concerned with the management or utilization of resources and it is thermodynamics that provides the basis for the answers to many of the questions. Although this book concerns physical resources and their exploitation, it is necessary to use energy in the processing of these materials and so it follows that we have to understand the properties of energy and how it interacts with matter.
