Workshop Exercises For Connecting Fundamentals To Equipment In The First Thermodynamics Course

Using balance equations for mass, energy and entropy and property diagrams for analysis, design and intuition about thermodynamic processes is a basic skill which many students find difficult to master. The abstractness of these fundamental relationships and graphs requires students to have moved from concrete to abstract thinking, but this often has not occurred by the second year. Further, many students lack essential connections between scientific/technological descriptions and physical behavior of real systems. We believe that a successful first course in engineering thermodynamics must address these issues by careful and comprehensive pedagogy and assessment. This paper describes our approach that involves laboratory workshops. In our course is taken principally by mechanical and chemical engineering majors. For it, we have developed nearly a dozen 1-hour laboratory sessions to augment classroom activities and to facilitate student growth in connecting descriptions to behavior. These include 1) simple custom devices such as piston/cylinder systems and instrumented spray bottles of refrigerant, 2) "familiar" household devices such as bicycle generators, refrigerators and room air conditioners, and 3) university steam generator and chiller facilities. The goal is to engage learners and then lead them through directed exploration, schematic representation and thermodynamic calculation to establish a comprehensive view. In addition to the developments and workshop exercises we currently use, we discuss our mixed success in this effort. It seems that for students to achieve any level of mastery, we are limited by the time it takes to overcome their deficiencies in certain very basic knowledge and skills. It is likely that teachers often overlook such impediments to deep learning when preparing foundational courses. We are continuing to refine our techniques to achieve the highest possible level of success.