Applied Thermodynamics
The laws taken to real hardware: control volumes and steady flow, turbines and compressors, power and refrigeration cycles, and the price of every loss.
Control volumes and mass flow
Every law so far was written for a fixed lump of matter, and no working machine holds one, so the boundary is redrawn around a region of space instead.
Flow work and the energy equation
Mass crossing a boundary has to be pushed across, and the cost of that push is what turns internal energy into enthalpy and gives one equation for every open device.
The steady-flow devices
Nozzles, turbines, compressors, throttles, heat exchangers and mixing chambers are one energy equation with different terms struck out, and knowing which to strike is the skill.
Charging and emptying
What happens when the contents of a control volume change: filling a bottle, blowing one down, and why a cylinder is hot after charging and cold after venting.
Isentropic efficiency
The energy balance cannot tell a good turbine from a broken one, so the Second Law supplies the ideal device to measure against and the efficiency that scores it.
Cycles and the mean temperature
Chaining devices into a loop gives a cycle, whose efficiency turns out to be exactly Carnot's evaluated at the mean temperature at which the cycle takes heat in.
The Rankine cycle
Four devices in a loop, analysed completely with real steam data, first as an ideal cycle and then with real turbine and pump efficiencies, down to the coal burned per day.
Superheat, reheat and regeneration
Three modifications to the same plant, each attacking the mean temperature at which heat enters the cycle, taking its efficiency from 33 to 46 per cent.
The Brayton cycle
Burn the fuel inside the working fluid instead of behind a tube wall, and the whole cycle collapses into three numbers: pressure ratio, peak temperature, and how good the two machines are.
Combined cycles and cogeneration
A gas turbine's exhaust is a heat source at 800 K, so putting a steam cycle underneath it turns two ordinary efficiencies into the best thermal efficiency ever built.
Refrigeration and heat pumps
Drive the loop backwards and it moves heat up a temperature gradient instead of making work, which needs a new score, a valve where a turbine should be, and one refrigerant.
Exergy
Price every stream by the work it could still deliver against the surroundings, charge every irreversibility in joules, and a power station's losses turn out to be somewhere nobody was looking.