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Preface

  • Page ID
    19861
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    Prince George's Community College
    General Chemistry for Engineering
    CHM 2000

    clipboard_e3097cdd7680f8988012b6fdbbbbe1b37.png
    Unit I: Atoms      Unit II: Molecules     Unit III: States of Matter     Unit IV: Reactions     Unit V: Kinetics & Equilibrium
    Unit VI: Thermo & Electrochemistry
         Unit VII: Nuclear Chemistry

    This is the first text in a new, coordinated engineering curriculum, integrating Introduction to Engineering, Chemistry, Physics and Calculus. These courses are commonly taken by first and second year engineering students, but except for Introduction to Engineering, they are not designed for engineers.

    Particularly in the case of chemistry, the normal courses assume that students do not know many things that engineering students do such as the SI system, emphasize many things that are superfluous to most engineers such as bio-chemistry, and, because most engineers only take the first semester, leave out important topics such as chemical kinetics and equilibrium.

    Many things that are customarily taught in General Chemistry, such as the old quantum theory (Bohr atom, Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle), may be mentioned but will not be covered in this course, because you will encounter them in General Physics. The course assumes that engineering students know a number of topics generally covered in General Chemistry such as SI units, significant figures, conversion factors, dimensional analysis, logarithms and exponents, etc..

    This textbook is designed for an intensive, one semester, General Chemistry course for Engineers including kinetics, equilibrium and electrochemistry. Biologically oriented topics often found in General Chemistry textbooks are eliminated and replaced by materials centered themes

    The traditional approach of General Chemistry Texts is ad hoc, sequentially introducing any number of models of chemical bonding and reaction without providing a conceptual basis for them. This Atoms First text starts by discussing atomic structure, the periodic table and molecular structure. The ad hoc models are then easily seen to be special applications of the more general atomic structure taught at the beginning of this course. After this chapters describe states of matter and simple chemical reactions, followed by discussion of chemical kinetics, equilibrium, thermodynamics, electrochemistry and nuclear chemistry. The text discusses exciting and relevant aspects of materials science that are usually relegated to the last few chapters,

    LibreTexts provides a platform in which links to external material, videos and more can be integrated.

    Finally using the LibreTexts platform lessens the substantial cost of a textbook, which exceeds $(US) 250 today.

    The authors acknowledge the help and support of Prof. Delmar Larson at UC Davis who created and runs the LibreText project. Prof. Larson has been a great help and mentor in preparing this text.

    Broader impacts of research and teaching are an important part of a scientist's life and are made possible by the freedom to explore new things granted by universities and research agencies. Joshua Halpern (Howard University), Scott Sinex and Scott Johnson (both PGCC) gratefully acknowledge the support of this LibreTexts Book by NSF Award 1205608. Josh Halpern acknowledges the support of NSF Award 1524638.

    Maintenance and revisions of this book are being carried out with the support of a grant from the NASA MUREP program

    Contributors

    Contributed by Joshua Halpern, Scott Sinex and Scott Johnson


    Preface is shared under a CC BY-SA license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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