Publisher's Synopsis
Thermodynamics is the much abused slave of many masters physicists who love the totally impractical Carnot process, mechanical engineers who design power stations and refrigerators, chemists who are successfully synthesizing ammonia and are puzzled by photosynthesis, meteorologists who calculate cloud bases and predict föhn, boraccia and scirocco, physico-chemists who vulcanize rubber and build fuel cells, chemical engineers who rectify natural gas and distil f- mented potato juice, metallurgists who improve steels and harden surfaces, - trition counselors who recommend a proper intake of calories, mechanics who adjust heat exchangers, architects who construe - and often misconstrue - ch- neys, biologists who marvel at the height of trees, air conditioning engineers who design saunas and the ventilation of air plane cabins, rocket engineers who create supersonic flows, et cetera. Not all of these professional groups need the full depth and breadth of ther- dynamics. For some it is enough to consider a well-stirred tank, for others a s- tionary nozzle flow is essential, and yet others are well-served with the partial d- ferential equation of heat conduction. It is therefore natural that thermodynamics is prone to mutilation; different group-specific meta-thermodynamics' have emerged which serve the interest of the groups under most circumstances and leave out aspects that are not often needed in their fields.
