Blowing off Steam Tables

Abstract

is an associate professor in Mechanical Engineering at Rowan University. He received his Ph.D. from University of Michigan in 2008 and his B.S. from Union College in 2003. His research interests include combustion synthesis of nanoparticles and combustion catalysis using nanoparticles. He is also involved in developing educational apps for instructional and research purposes.

A Visual Approach To Teaching Properties Of Water In Engineering Thermodynamics

“…To counter that we must recognize the FE exam already relies exclusively on the pressure-enthalpy (P-h) property chart for refrigerant R-134a to solve refrigeration problems; at the same time supplying the tables to solve steam problems. Our own research has shown that students using water property charts are able to internalize property trends (Bakrania and Carrig, 2016), predict changes in properties (Bakrania and Mallouk, 2017), and perform better on engineering problems involving steam as a working fluid (Bakrania and Haas, 2019). This body of evidence must be translated into engineering education practice that is easy to adopt and fit the existing instructional content.…”

Teaching Thermodynamic Properties of Water Without Tears

“…Additionally, charts reinforce the interdependent nature of the state properties and help the students develop a mental model of equation of state for water. Previous studies have already demonstrated that the students who use water property charts are better at predicting state property trends when going from one state to the other [7,8]. Online/web tools or the steam tables, on the other hand, often deliver only point values without contextual information related to the fluid region.…”

“…To encourage students to embrace the property charts and familiarize them with the overall concept, custom designed T-shirts with printed T-s charts were distributed. Students continue to wear these T-shirts beyond the course completion, often inspiring discussions with other colleagues on what the chart represents [8]. An iPad app, titled Clausius , was designed to demonstrate the dynamic changes in properties as one glides their fingers across a T-s chart [19].…”

“…Toward streamlining the teaching of water properties and comparing it with ideal gas properties, we present here a study of a flipped classroom model involving a pair of videos highlighting a chart-based approach to learning the property behaviors of ideal gases and water. The advantages of chart-based property determination are highlighted elsewhere [7,8], and include facile interpretation of thermodynamic property trends [9,10] compared to properties determined by either tabular lookup or many online property lookup tools (e.g., NIST Chemistry WebBook [11]). As shown later, distinction among these three approaches to determining thermodynamic properties distinguish this study from those more generally involving a flipped classroom, for which successful learning hinges on leveraging the medium best suited for knowledge transfer.…”

“…Instructional implementation and the embedded resources are presented in detail to encourage easy adoption within the engineering curriculum. The major contribution of this work is to extend prior emphasis of the several advantages of chart-based approach teaching water properties [7,8], now including video delivery of instruction.…”