The suggestion to write this book was offered by a good friend, Professor Ward Frea, of Michigan Technological University. Sadly, he died while cross-country skiing (he was a champion skier) before he was able to contribute to the text.

But his idea of combining the thermal sciences into one text was a good one and we have done just that. There are often three courses, Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics, and Heat Transfer, which make up the introductory series in thermal sciences. In some curricula there may be only two required courses, and in some only one thermal science course that introduces all three subjects. This text is written so it can be used in either the two-semester sequence of thermodynamics and fluid mechanics or in the course that introduces all three subjects. Possibly, in a second edition, the heat transfer material, which is introduced in several sections at appropriate locations in the text, will be expanded to provide for a full semester Course.

Thermodynamics and fluid mechanics texts have increased in length over the years so that now they each may contain 1000 pages. Much of that material is never used in the classroom and much of it tends to confuse the students with material that’s not significant to the subject at hand. We have attempted to eliminate much of that material, especially the material that’s most often reserved for an advanced course.

By combining the thermal science material into one text, we have maintained the same nomenclature as much as possible throughout the book. This eliminates the confusion that often results when using texts written by different authors. For example, we use O to denote heat transfer and O to denote flow rate. We use qn to denote energy emitted per unit area due to radiation, rather than the more Conventional but unusual G. This makes for a more unified approach to thermal Science and presents thermal science as one subject rather than three separate subjects, There are situations, however, where the desire to use the same variable gives way to a more logical choice: we use v for specific volume in thermodynamics but in fluid mechanics it represents a velocity component. The context eliminates any possible confusion in these cases.