This text gives students a clear and easily understood introduction to entropy - a central concept in thermodynamics, but one which is often regarded as the most difficult to grasp. Professor Dugdale first presents a classical and historical view of entropy, looking in detail at the scientists who developed the concept, and at how they arrived at their ideas. This is followed by a statistical treatment which provides a more physical portrait of entropy, relating it to disorder and showing how physical and chemical systems tend to states of order at low temperatures. Dugdale includes here a brief account of some of the more intriguing manifestations of order in properties such as superconductivity and superfluidity.Entropy and Its Physical Meaning also includes a number of exercises which can be used for both self- learning and class work. It is intended to provide a complete understanding of the concept of entropy, making it valuable reading for undergraduates in physics, physical sciences and engineering, and for students studying thermodynamics within other science courses such as meteorology, biology and medicine.

Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics provides undergraduate chemistry students with a grounding in both classical and statistical thermodynamics. Thermodynamic quantities and relationships are introduced and developed in a coherent way, enabling students to apply thermodynamic analysis to chemical problems with confidence. Each stage in the development is well illustrated with examples. The text aims to help students understand energy, its different forms and transformations, and the key role of entropy, as applied to chemical systems, addressing questions such as: (i) How much work is performed, and how much heat transfer occurs, during chemical processes and reactions, and how do they depend on temperature? (ii) How is it possible for endothermic processes to occur spontaneously, and will a given reaction occur spontaneously? (iii) What determines the equilibrium between phases? (iv) How do temperature and pressure affect equilibrium? (v) What is the meaning of entropy? (vi) How are macroscopic thermodynamic properties related to microscopic energy levels? Ideal for the needs of undergraduate chemistry students, Tutorial Chemistry Texts is a major series consisting of short, single topic or modular texts concentrating on the fundamental areas of chemistry taught in undergraduate science courses. Each book provides a concise account of the basic principles underlying a given subject, embodying an independent-learning philosophy and including worked examples.

This book deals with theoretical thermodynamics and the statistical physics of electron and particle gases. It treats the laws of thermodynamics from a classical and a quantum theoretical view point. The free energy is calculated with a Gibbs formalism.

The second law of thermodynamics is an example of the fundamental laws that govern our universe and is relevant to every branch of science exploring the physical world. This reference summarizes knowledge and concepts about the second law of thermodynamics and entropy. A verbatim explanation of chemical thermodynamics is presented by the author, making this text easy to understand for chemistry students, researchers, non-experts, and educators.

One of the grand challenges in the nano-scopic computing era is guarantees of robustness. Robust computing system design is confronted with quantum physical, probabilistic, and even biological phenomena, and guaranteeing high reliability is much more difficult than ever before. Scaling devices down to the level of single electron operation will bring forth new challenges due to probabilistic effects and uncertainty in guaranteeing 'zero-one' based computing. Minuscule devices imply billions of devices on a single chip, which may help mitigate the challenge of uncertainty by replication and redundancy. However, such device densities will create a design and validation nightmare with the shear scale. The questions that confront computer engineers regarding the current status of nanocomputing material and the reliability of systems built from such miniscule devices, are difficult to articulate and answer. We have found a lack of resources in the confines of a single volume that at least partially attempts to answer these questions. We believe that this volume contains a large amount of research material as well as new ideas that will be very useful for some one starting research in the arena of nanocomputing, not at the device level, but the problems one would face at system level design and validation when nanoscopic physicality will be present at the device level.

The methods of chemical thermodynamics are effectively used in many fields of science and technology. Mastering these methods and their use in practice requires profound comprehension of the theoretical questions and acquisition of certain calculating skills. This book is useful to undergraduate and graduate students in chemistry as well as chemical, thermal and refrigerating technology; it will also benefit specialists in all other fields who are interested in using these powerful methods in their practical activities.

Volume 1: General Introduction to Molecular Sciences Volume 2: Physical Aspects of Molecular Systems Volume 3: Electronic Structure and Chemical Reactivity Volume 4: Molecular Phenomena in Biological Sciences

The book aims to explain the basic ideas of thermal physics intuitively and in the simplest possible way. It is intended to make the reader feel comfortable with the ideas of entropy and of free energy. Thermal physics is prone to misunderstanding, confusion and is often overlooked. However, a good foundation is necessary to prepare the reader for advanced level studies.

Given that thermodynamics books are not a rarity on the market, why would an additional one be useful? The answer is simple: at any level, thermodynamics is usually taught as a somewhat abstruse discipline where many students get lost in a maze of difficult concepts. However, thermodynamics is not as intricate a subject as most people feel. This book fills a niche between elementary textbooks and mathematically oriented treatises, and provides readers with a distinct approach to the subject. As indicated by the title, this book explains thermodynamic phenomena and concepts in physical terms before proceeding to focus on the requisite mathematical aspects. It focuses on the effects of pressure, temperature and chemical composition on thermodynamic properties and places emphasis on rapidly evolving fields such as amorphous materials, metastable phases, numerical simulations of microsystems and high-pressure thermodynamics. Topics like redox reactions are dealt with in less depth, due to the fact that there is already much literature available. Without requiring a background in quantum mechanics, this book also illustrates the main practical applications of statistical thermodynamics and gives a microscopic interpretation of temperature, pressure and entropy. This book is perfect for undergraduate and graduate students who already have a basic knowledge of thermodynamics and who wish to truly understand the subject and put it in a broader physical perspective. The book is aimed not at theoretical physicists, but rather at practitioners with a variety of backgrounds from physics to biochemistry for whom thermodynamics is a tool which would be better used if better understood.