Fundamental v. Applied Thermodynamics

[Dave Cell]

Hey everyone. I have an engineering background and I also supervise a science club at a local school. I'm trying to think of ways to relate my applied science knowledge to some more fundamental science in order to better represent the mathematicians and fundamentalists. I was thinking of explaining how a lot of engineering properties come from science and math. For example, in grad school I remember the prof deriving the specific heat of a gas from the M-B distribution. I'm somewhat ignorant regarding this since my field was in mechanics and we only ever really had to know what the M-B distribution was.

 

Can anyone recommend a good reference for this? I managed to find online that I can also do this for thermal and electrical conductivities but I haven't seen these worked out either. I'm guessing the math is a bit too difficult for high school students but I'd like to work through it myself just so that I'm confident with it. Also, does anyone know how well these types of derived properties fit to experimental data?

 

I welcome any other ideas you might have. I'm trying to stay away from electromagnetism, however, because we just had a big project on that.

 

Thanks for any help.

 

Dave

[Bignose]

The Mathematical Theory of Non-Uniform Gases by Chapman & Cowling. An absolute classic in the field. Calculus is an absolute must as a prereq, and some knowledge of differential equations will help quite a bit.