Originally Posted by
mollusk
I agree with the prof. This is grad school. "Plug and chug" teaching of engineering is actually outdated even for undergrads. I've been preaching this for over 20 years, but things move at a glacial pace in education. (Yes, there is a joke there about receding recently.) If it is "plug and chug" then it probably fits on a floppy and floppys have been outmoded for a good long time. You don't want an education that is so easily mimicked with a simple computer program. This course should not be about getting numerical answers. This course should be about getting a deep understanding of the subject matter.
Real thermo is beautiful and elegant. And it is the only "classical" pillar of physics that is still standing. Don't think about the course for learning how to analyse mixtures of gases with different phase diagrams that are being cooled (even though you should be learning this!), but rather as getting to the real meaning of the first and second laws as well as the reason for the zero-th law and third laws.
I see what you're saying and I probably explained myself incorrectly.
I really want to understand thermo. For instance, my research deals with the Mo-Ni-Al-Ir-Hf system. I'm developing a new high temperature materials system based off of Mo, which has inherently poor oxidation, so I'm coating a (Mo)-NiAl alloy with a Ir-Hf modified NiAl for oxidation resistance. I am doing so through a combination of electroplating, pack cementation, and some other interesting things. From what I've said you can see that there are a lot of interfaces with different chemistries and a lot of high temperature processing, giving enough solid state diffusion for some interesting things to happen. I would love to have a more thorough understanding of thermo to get a better grasp of what kind of phases I should be expecting given my experimental parameters (coating thickness, pack time/composition, annealing temperature), but there is also a lot of kinetics involved.
The thermo class I'm in right now involves the professor putting up a slide of equations and letting us look at them for a few minutes. Then he proceeds to the next slide. It's absolutely awful. I just don't want to sound like I want the equations handed to me, because that's not it at all. Well now it's back to studying for the test.