Despite the fact that I never said much about it here, Thermo was my favorite class this semester. Since I'm a mechanical engineer because I love thermal-fluids, this wasn't really a surprise. The reason I didn't mention it much was that it was pretty low-key, particularly compared to UOCD.
Below the fold are my thoughts on Thermo!
There was a pattern to Thermo: reading for Monday, a problem set due Thursday, and a combination of lecture, discussion, and short practice questions during class. Jessica, who was also my ModSim professor, assigned reading and then
started each problem set with notes on the readings. I'd generally read
Jessica's notes first and then go to the textbook(s) for clarification. At the end of the semester, we transitioned over to projects, which we did in pairs or trios.
Something about which I was very intentional during Thermo was thinking about the physical system and not just working with the mathematics behind the system. In previous classes I've sometimes relied on quantitative analysis and haven't gained as much a qualitative and physical understanding of the material as I'd like, and I wanted to avoid that. The short questions we did in class tended to be qualitative, which was useful, and the longer and more involved questions on the homework required thinking about the physical system before abstracting to a model.
Thermo is all about modeling, which really means that it's all about assumptions. (Okay, yes, it's also about heat, work, engines, and refrigerators, but anything you actually do is modeling.) I got a lot of practice clearly stating all my assumptions at the beginning of a problem and then basing everything else off of them. It was surprisingly similar to the proofs I used to do in logic courses. One of the learning goals for the course that Jessica set was that we learn to clearly communicate a thermodynamic analysis and the meaning of the results, both orally and in writing, and that learning goal is the non-content-focused one which I think I most fulfilled.
My project was on pressurized air receiver tower solar plants. Most large solar plants heat molten salt and use that as the working fluid. My partner Erzsi and I studied a system that instead pressurizes and heats air, which is used to power a gas turbine. The excess heat from the air is used to heat water, which then powers a steam turbine. Once we had drawn out the system and all the relevant diagrams, we started coding a simulation. The basic structure was pretty easy, but figure out the right values for various parameters was difficult. There wasn't as much relevant research as we thought, so we had to pull different numbers from several different places. In the end, our system ended up being really large; assuming almost no losses in the system, the plant could power all the houses in Phoenix. We were able to explain the results pretty well, though, so it didn't seem ridiculous.
Thermo is an interesting counterpart to Transport in that they're both thermal-fluids courses, but Thermo involves much less math than does Transport. One of my other personal goals for Thermo was to explore interesting thermo-related math, and I ended up doing that for what Jessica called our non-specified entry. (We all had to turn in a portfolio with a few of our assignments, our project paper, and another entry that was up to us, as well as reflections on everything.) I found a paper that used graph theory to model refrigeration cycles. It was interesting to read, though the use of graph theory wasn't as extensive as I hoped.
Thermo wasn't flashy, but I loved the material, and I thought Jessica taught the class in a really effective way.
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