Preface

The Exergy Method is a relatively new analysis technique in which the basis of
evaluation of thermodynamic losses follows from the Second Law rather than the First
Law of Thermodynamics. Thus it belongs to that category of analyses known as
Second Law analyses. Another name which has been used, mostly in the past, is
Availability Analysis.
This book is intended for undergraduate and postgraduate Mechanical and
Chemical Engineering students and for practising engineers. The topics covered
include various aspects of power generation, refrigeration and cryogenic processes,
distillation, and chemical processes, including combustion. Thermoeconomics, to
which the whole of Chapter 6 is devoted, is a relatively new area of application of the
Exergy Method and may be said to be still in a state of fluxmore so than the other
aspects of the Exergy Method. However, the technique has developed sufficiently to be
useful in analysis and optimisation of thermal and chemical plants.
The book lends itself directly to use by the more advanced undergraduate students,
postgraduate students and anyone who is already familiar with the fundamentals of
Applied Thermodynamics and the traditional techniques of application of this
discipline to thermal or chemical systems or both. In teaching undergraduate students,
I feel that the concepts and techniques of the Exergy Method should be integrated into
a course of Engineering Thermodynamics to complement and reinforce the traditional
work. Those who adopt this approach will find this book easily adaptable for this
purpose. Chapter 1 gives some ideas for the introduction of the fundamentals in the first
year of an undergraduate course. The introduction of the Second Law through the
Entropy Postulate leads naturally to the formulation of the concept of entropy
production. Calculating entropy production for a system, or entropy production rate
in steady flow processes, in some simple numerical examples gives valuable experience
of a quantitative assessment of the degree of thermodynamic perfection of a process and
an opportunity to handle such basic concepts as isolated system, environment, thermal
energy reservoir, control surface, etc. The concept of entropy production is also applied,
as a subsidiary quantity, in the derivation of some fundamental exergy relations.
The bulk of the material in Chapters 2 to 6 can be dealt with in the second and third
year of an undergraduate course of Engineering Thermodynamics. In the second year
course the simpler concepts of the Exergy Method can be introduced and the methods
of analysis applied to the less complex physical processes such as compression and
expansion, heat transfer, mixing, and simple separation processes. Multi-component

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plants such as the more elementary types of power plants and refrigeration plants can
then be analysed. In preparation for the introduction in the third year of the concept of
chemical exergy, the maximum work of a chemical reaction and the concept of chemical
potential should be covered. A simple treatment of these topics is given in Chapter 1.
The third year course should start with the extension of the exergy analysis to include
chemically reacting systems. The required depth of treatment might be greater for
Chemical Engineering students than for those in Mechanical Engineering; the more
advanced treatment of chemical exergy and related concepts is given in Appendix A.
The third year course should also include in-depth treatment of the application of the
Exergy Method to areas, according to particular specialisation, such as: expanders and
compressors, heat exchangers, refrigeration and cryogenic processes, distillation
processes, chemical processes, combustion, power generation, and thermoeconomics.
Quite clearly, because of the different ways in which Engineering Thermodynamics is
taught, the scheme outlined above is intended only for general guidance.
In the course of writing this book I have received much help and encouragement
from my colleagues at Queen Mary College and from fellow thermodynamicists from
outside the college. In particular I should Hke to thank Professor W. A. W o o d s of the
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Queen Mary College for his support and
encouragement and to M r Jeff Cooper of the same Department for his comments on
Chapter 1.1 am also very much obliged to Professor Emeritus R. S. Silver of Glasgow
University and Professor J. Szargut of Silesian Technological University, Poland, for
their helpful criticisms and suggestions on Chapter 6.
D r J. R. Flower of the Department of Chemical Engineering of Leeds University has
read some sections of the book and kindly offered his comments on sections on
distillation, for which I am very grateful.
My special thanks go to my friend and colleague D r Raj Raichura of the Department
of Nuclear Engineering, Queen Mary College, who read through the draft manuscript
and contributed many valuable suggestions for improvement. I am also grateful to him
for the many discussions, which helped to clarify many an obscure point and
engendered some new ideas.
My thanks are also due to D r G. P. Moss of the Department of Chemistry, Queen
Mary College, for checking names of organic compounds in Table A.4, to my
postgraduate student, M r Deogratias Kibiikyo for the computation of Tables D . l , D.2
and D.3, to Mrs Marian Parsons for drawing with skill and care the illustrations and to
Mrs Audrey Hinton for her patience and perseverance while typing a very difficult
manuscript.
Finally, I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to all authors on whose work I have
drawn. In particular, I have benefited from the books of Professors J. Szargut, R. Ptela
and V. M. Brodyanskii. While writing Chapter 61 found papers by Dr-Ing. J. Beyer and
Professors R. B. Evans and Y. M. El-Sayed especially valuable. The benefits derived
from these and other authors are gratefully acknowledged in references to their works,
and any omissions in this respect are indeed unintentional.

Tadeusz J. Kotas

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Queen Mary College
University of London

May 984