This online textbook was developed during the summer of 2014 and is no longer being actively developed.
My Dear Students,
It is my pleasure to introduce you to this new web-based, open educational resource for the AME 2213 Thermodynamics course. I hope our summer project will be helpful to you as it will enable you to have free access at any time and place to the course materials and improve your learning environments by offering you global experience. To create this resource I was supported by The University of Oklahoma Library’s Open Educational Resources initiative, specifically Ms. Stacy Zemke who funded the project, educated us on the variety of licenses for open educational resources, and help us identify some of the materials. While I worked for the second part of this project remotely from my parents’ house in Bulgaria, my two students – Brian Wanezeck and Gene Ilichev helped me tremendously to finish the project before the beginning of the semester. Cody Taylor too helped create and organize the webspace. Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to Professor Urieli who four years ago created one of the first web-based educational resources for Thermodynamics. With his permission we used extensively his material here. I deeply value his expertise, pedagogical approaches, and teaching philosophy and I will continue to follow his advice and his presentations in the field and the community. Your input is very important and welcome as I believe it will improve the quality of this educational resource.
My intention of creating this open educational resource is to give you and anyone who is interested in learning the engineering approach of Thermodynamics free access to material, independent of any textbook. The content is designed for a one semester introduction to Thermodynamics for Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering majors. I hope through the Thermodynamics open educational resource the cost of student materials will be drastically reduced. It will support a broader initiative started nationally a few years ago at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Yale University, and Harvard, and now at The University of Oklahoma. This web-based, open-access educational resource will give me, the instructor, the ability to customize materials instead of following traditional textbooks. Finally, this project could enable other faculty around the globe to customize the materials for their specific educational needs.
Creative Projects
Last December, students in my Thermodynamics class presented creative work as part of their second project. The presentations are always a high-energy event, as students present their creative takes on the first and second laws of Thermodynamics by creating everything from poems and songs, to short stories and even a simple gas power plant. The attached videos are not only fun, but they show future engineers showing passion about engineering and engaged in original thinking.
All students gave permission for their work to be displayed here and each retains the copyright to their own work. Any Creative Commons license applied to this site, applies not to these student works.
License
This material is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License. Bellow you will find the different topics we will cover through the semester, organized in chapters. This module discusses The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics. After the introduction of every concept you will be offered a couple of examples with solved problems, supplemental materials, property tables, and examples from last year projects and assignments from your peers.
Attribution
This text is heavily based on the online Thermodynamics textbook by Israel Urieli.
