This repository contains an electronic book of example problems in thermodynamics, in the format of Jupyter notebooks, developed to supplement the course ME 540, Intermediate Thermodynamics, taught at Oregon State University by Prof. Kyle Niemeyer.
These example problems are adapted from those given in the (excellent) textbook Thermodynamics by Sanford Klein and Gregory Nellis (2017, Cambridge University Press, 3rd edition). The original examples and problems in this book were solved using EES (Engineering Equation Solver), while the examples here use Python combined with Cantera and the SciPy ecosystem of packages, along with Pint for converting units. All artwork here is original.
I developed this material as an open educational resource, with the goal of enabling the widest possible use. Creative content is released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) License and code under the BSD 3-Clause License (see LICENSE.txt and LICENSE-text.txt for details).
If you reference this material in a scholarly publication, please cite it:
Kyle E. Niemeyer. (2026) computational-thermo v2026.02. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.216848202
A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
@misc{computational-thermo-book,
author = {Kyle E Niemeyer},
year = 2026,
title = {{computational-thermo} v2026.02},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.21684820},
url = {https://github.com/kyleniemeyer/computational-thermo},
}Contributions are welcome! Please see the contributing guide for more information.
The code portions of this material are licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License (described in LICENSE.txt) while the non-code portions of the material are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY, described in LICENSE-text.txt).
To quickly get started, you can use a few free services to run Jupyter via your browser.
Read more in the "Setting up your computing environment" module.