Course Meeting Times
Lectures: 2 sessions / week, 100 minutes / session
Prerequisites
2.42 General Thermodynamics or permission of instructor
Course Description
This course is a self-contained concise review of general thermodynamics concepts, multicomponent equilibrium properties, chemical equilibrium, electrochemical potentials, and chemical kinetics, as needed to introduce the methods of nonequilibrium thermodynamics and to provide a unified understanding of phase equilibria, transport, and nonequilibrium phenomena useful for future energy and climate engineering technologies. Applications include second-law efficiencies and methods to allocate primary energy consumptions and CO2 emissions in cogeneration and hybrid power systems, minimum work of separation, maximum work of mixing, osmotic pressure and membrane equilibria, metastable states, spinodal decomposition, Onsager’s near-equilibrium reciprocity in thermodiffusive, thermoelectric, and electrokinetic cross effects.
Why should you take this course?
If you are a PhD student focusing on future energy technologies and climate engineering, you can gain significant advantages. You will benefit from in-depth instruction in multicomponent and nonequilibrium thermodynamics, beyond the basic concepts and analytical tools covered in 2.42 General Thermodynamics. This comprehensive exposure offers insights into less-explored connections and applications while fostering expertise in articulating general physical concepts precisely and relating them to practical engineering applications. Furthermore, it enhances your understanding of the fundamental approximations underpinning standard models in fluid mechanics, advanced transport phenomena, and chemical kinetics. This solid foundation equips you to explore and assess advanced modeling assumptions.
Additionally, like many MIT graduate students, you are likely to pursue an academic career. This course is designed to cultivate a strong, unifying grasp of the logical and physical foundations of rigorous thermodynamic modeling, emphasizing nonequilibrium and irreversible processes. It is tailored for those who will apply/advance thermodynamic modeling in their future careers and/or may end up teaching the subject. To this end, the course prioritizes mastering the foundational concepts, modeling assumptions, and derivations, and adopts an unorthodox cut designed to evaluate your verbal ability to articulate them clearly.
Consequently, there will be only one traditional homework assignment, on the topic of allocation of primary energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Instead, the course features four take-home midterm quizzes and a final oral exam. Each midterm quiz requires you to create a brief (maximum 5 minutes) video, explaining a topic using instructor-provided viewgraphs. The emphasis is on probing your capacity to provide precise and effective explanations, without the need to memorize formulas.
The final exam follows a similar approach, conducted in person, typically lasting only 30 minutes, and focusing on topics from the second and third parts of the course. Students are expected to be well-prepared on all relevant subjects and capable of orally explaining the viewgraphs presented by the instructor in class. Again, memorizing formulas is unnecessary, as they are already provided on the viewgraphs; the focus is on the ability to convey the correct logical presentation and use precise language to elucidate modeling assumptions, formulas, and details.
Course Outline
The first part of the course provides a brief and concise review of (1) general thermodynamics concepts needed for the third part of the course, with emphasis on the definitions of entropy for nonequilibrium states and of energy and entropy transfer in a heat interaction, and (2) their use in energy and materials processing applications to evaluate exergies and second-law efficiencies, and in hybrid power facilities to allocate primary energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This part will end with a pass/fail midterm examination before drop date.
The second part of the course focuses on chemical potentials and the equilibrium properties of multicomponent systems, ideal and nonideal gas mixtures and solutions, liquid-vapor, liquid-liquid and membrane equilibria for binary systems, with applications to minimum work of separation, maximum work of mixing, osmotic pressure, metastable states, and spinodal decomposition. It ends with a brief review of chemical equilibrium, electrochemical potentials, and chemical kinetics concepts, as needed for the third part of the course.
The third part is an introduction to concepts and methods of non-equilibrium thermodynamics: the local and constrained equilibrium assumptions that underlie the description of multicomponent flows, the simultaneous diffusion of energy, mass, charge, and entropy modeled by extending the concept of heat interaction, the near-equilibrium Onsager reciprocal relations derived from Ziegler’s principle of maximum entropy production, Curie’s symmetry principle, with applications to heat transfer in anisotropic composite materials (the Righi-Leduc effect), thermodiffusive cross effects (Soret, Dufour, membrane thermo-osmosis), thermoelectric effects (Seebeck, Peltier), and electrokinetic phenomena (electro-osmosis, streaming potential, electrophoresis, sedimentation potential). This part will end with a brief overview of how recent research efforts attempt to extend thermodynamics to the realm of far-nonequilibrium phenomena.
Reference Textbook
Proofs and examples to complement the first two parts of the course can be found in the reference textbook: Gyftopoulos, Elias P. and Gian Paolo Beretta. Thermodynamics: Foundations and Applications. Dover Publications, 2010. ISBN: 9780486439327.
Grading Policy
Midterm assignment on allocation: 15%
Four midterm quizzes: 10% each
Final oral exam: 45%
Grading type: Letter grades (A–F) with ±
Final grade: weighted average (rounded upwards) based on A = 5, B = 4, C = 3, D = 2, F = 0, ± = ±0.33
