CH ENGR 102A
Thermodynamics I
Description: Lecture, four hours; discussion, one hour; outside study, seven hours. Introduction to thermodynamics of chemical and biological processes. Work, energy, heat, and first law of thermodynamics. Second law, extremum principles, entropy, and free energy. Ideal and real gases, property evaluation. Thermodynamics of flow systems. Applications of first and second laws in biological processes and living organisms. Letter grading.
Units: 4.0
Units: 4.0
1 of 1
AD
Most Helpful Review
Winter 2020 - This class was utterly brutal, and as the professor himself said, the hardest class you'll ever take in your life. It's a sick beast of its own, and will singlehandedly ruin your Winter Quarter. Don't take this as a tech breadth; the A/A- will not be worth the sheer amount of time and effort expended for this class. The lectures were 2 hour slogs where you'd sit down and watch the professor write math down on the board. No really; Vasily lectured more on math, and esoteric technicalities of math rather than actual thermodynamics for the vast majority of the lectures. The only reason to go to lectures is for the rare times when Vasily actually sets up a homework problem for you, or when he does an example problem that you can both understand and is relevant for exams. Unfortunately, you never know when the lecture is useful, but if it is, it can save you several hours on homework. Somewhat fortunate is that this guy is pretty funny at times, especially when he roasts electric cars, green engineering, chemists, and other stuff not directly related to this class. Now the homework, something that could only have come from the DEPTHS OF HELL. Seriously. We got 4 homework assignments during the quarter, and each is a minimum of 20 pages long, typed in size 11 font. I took a grad level class, Bioengr C101 (taught by the hardest professor in the Bioengineering department), Tang's ChemE 45 class (another dreaded class), and MATLAB along with this class, and this class's demanded more time then those classes COMBINED. Also, while Diff Eqs are not a prerequisite for this class, they were still used extensively in this course, making the course even harder. The homework singlehandedly ruined my quarter. I know of people who did the homework WHILE consulting the solution manual. This class still demanded 20+ hours/week for them, despite them looking at solution manuals. Take a light courseload when you take Vasily's class. While you absolutely have to take it Winter quarter Sophomore year (or if you're a transfer, your 2nd quarter here), you can control the other classes you take concurrently. In particular, taking this class ALONGSIDE ChemE 104a is a really bad idea.
Winter 2020 - This class was utterly brutal, and as the professor himself said, the hardest class you'll ever take in your life. It's a sick beast of its own, and will singlehandedly ruin your Winter Quarter. Don't take this as a tech breadth; the A/A- will not be worth the sheer amount of time and effort expended for this class. The lectures were 2 hour slogs where you'd sit down and watch the professor write math down on the board. No really; Vasily lectured more on math, and esoteric technicalities of math rather than actual thermodynamics for the vast majority of the lectures. The only reason to go to lectures is for the rare times when Vasily actually sets up a homework problem for you, or when he does an example problem that you can both understand and is relevant for exams. Unfortunately, you never know when the lecture is useful, but if it is, it can save you several hours on homework. Somewhat fortunate is that this guy is pretty funny at times, especially when he roasts electric cars, green engineering, chemists, and other stuff not directly related to this class. Now the homework, something that could only have come from the DEPTHS OF HELL. Seriously. We got 4 homework assignments during the quarter, and each is a minimum of 20 pages long, typed in size 11 font. I took a grad level class, Bioengr C101 (taught by the hardest professor in the Bioengineering department), Tang's ChemE 45 class (another dreaded class), and MATLAB along with this class, and this class's demanded more time then those classes COMBINED. Also, while Diff Eqs are not a prerequisite for this class, they were still used extensively in this course, making the course even harder. The homework singlehandedly ruined my quarter. I know of people who did the homework WHILE consulting the solution manual. This class still demanded 20+ hours/week for them, despite them looking at solution manuals. Take a light courseload when you take Vasily's class. While you absolutely have to take it Winter quarter Sophomore year (or if you're a transfer, your 2nd quarter here), you can control the other classes you take concurrently. In particular, taking this class ALONGSIDE ChemE 104a is a really bad idea.
1 of 1
