chemical

This book is used as graduate text for GTech, ChBE course, and suffices in context of summarizing a large amount of material on fugacities in mixtures, empirical methods used for prediction and analysis of phase euilibria problems. With no previous exposure to Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics, I found Smith and Van Hess to be greatly helpful in explaining basic concepts, and providing a lucid, logical development of the subject. While Prausnitz dwells at length on the behavior of mixtures, the development of the subject leaves one wanting for a lot more, and hence this book will always need atleat one complementary text like Smith's book to be a useful text. The topics explained really well in the text include fugacities in gas and liquid mixtures, and calculation of solubilities of solids or gases in liquids. Other areas of thermodynamics are either ignored or coverage is sketchy (for examples treatment of polymers, electrolytes, use of statistical mechanics, etc).

The book explains clearly the subjects making easy to understand the topics. I would suggest chem. eng to use it as a tool for understanding any specific subject in phase equilibria. It points out clearly the principles. Any book written by Dr. Prausnitz has high quality.

This is the text that is used for graduate ChE thermo at Georgia Tech. I found many of the chapters to be very useful and complete. For example, the chapters on estimating fugacities and solubilities in gases and liquids were very well written. However, I found the treatment of some topics, such as equations of state and supercritical fluids to be somewhat superficial and not developed very well in general. Smith & Van Ness and The Properties of Gases and Liquids were useful supplements.