MIT OpenCourseWare | Aeronautics and Astronautics | 16.050 Thermal Energy, Fall 2002

The already-extensive lecture notes for this course have developed markedly in recent years, and now include, in addition to concepts and examples, a set of "muddy points". Through student feedback, the instructors have compiled a list of frequently misunderstood ideas, or "muddy points", and identified and addressed these pitfalls right in the notes.

This course is taught in four main parts. The first is a review of fundamental thermodynamic concepts (e.g. energy exchange in propulsion and power processes), and is followed by the second law (e.g. reversibility and irreversibility, lost work). Next are applications of thermodynamics to engineering systems (e.g. propulsion and power cycles, thermo chemistry), and the course concludes with fundamentals of heat transfer (e.g. heat exchange in aerospace devices).

This set of notes is presented without some material which is currently awaiting formal permission to be included. The notes used in the actual lectures thus contain additional information illustrating the application of concepts and the numerical values of some of the quantities described. It is hoped that the next edition can include this important material.