The Essentials of Chemical Thermodynamics

The subject of thermodynamics is widely acknowledged to be very important but notoriously difficult. Traditionally, it is approached in one of two ways, the classical and the statistical. The former confronts the student with the conceptual difficulty of entropy as a quantity that is constantly increasing and appears to be continuously created out of nothing, while the latter burdens the student with mathematics of frightening complexity. In this book, the author draws on his considerable experience of teaching thermodynamics to explain the essentials of the subject in a way that is scientifically rigorous, but avoids both the conceptual and mathematical difficulties that beset the more traditional approaches. The statistical nature is made clear from the outset without recourse to the sort of mathematics that is only marginally accessible to the student. The principal results of thermodynamic reasoning are first explained by considerations of entropy, after which the concepts of free energy and chemical potential are introduced as an optional, although very useful, alternative technique. The author has limited the material strictly to the essentials, so that the reader may come to a firm understanding of these in this clear and accessible handbook.