In the interest of transparency, MRS is a co-publisher of this publication. However, this review was commissioned by an independent Book Review Board.
This book’s author, Gerald H. Meier, is the William Kepler Whiteford Professor of Materials Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has taught for over 40 years. The book is touted “as an auxiliary text for students and a self-study guide for industry practitioners and academic researchers.” I fall into the latter category; 25 years after taking my last thermodynamics class, I read the book with the goal of brushing up on the fundamentals of surface-related work.
The book is true to its title and covers thermodynamics of materials surfaces with a focus on high-temperature, inorganic materials. Chapter 1 begins with basic bulk thermodynamics (e.g., the handling of multiphase equilibria and the Gibbs phase rule as applied to binary phase diagrams) and then expands to specific cases of surface phenomena. From there, surface quantities are introduced in chapter 2, and the concept of wetting, surfaces of crystalline solids, interphase interfaces, curved surfaces, adsorption, and adhesion are the topics of the following six chapters. Each chapter concludes with a few study questions. While the book preface promises not to have an “overwhelming amount of mathematics,” most of the concepts are illustrated mainly with mathematical formulations, followed by simple illustrations.
An advantage of completing a book review is that you are compelled to read the full book. If you buy this book, I encourage you to do the same. Chapter 1 is pretty much all math. However, there may not be a non-mathematical means to explain thermodynamics, and Meier does a good job explaining the basic principles. With the cobwebs around thermodynamics cleared from my head by the end of chapter 1, the book then turned out to be a good read, with very complex phenomena explained in a fairly simple and straightforward way. As a whole, I enjoyed this book and learned quite a bit.
The examples draw mainly from high-temperature cases in thermodynamics, such as a droplet of molten nickel forming on the surface of an oxide layer. This is not surprising considering that Meier was trained as a metallurgical engineer. However, the reader could have benefited from more modern applications of thermodynamic surfaces, such as an ink droplet on a surface of graphene. The book lays a firm theoretical basis, so at the end of the book, you can extrapolate to more diverse research topics, but some broader examples would have been more helpful.
Unfortunately, the book does not include the answers to the study problems. For people who have been out of the classroom for a long time, these would be very helpful. The answers are available online as “instructor resources” from Cambridge, but they are locked for instructors. I attempted to sign up for an instructor resources account, but then stopped when they asked for my course name and my website for verification of my position as an instructor (which I am not). Having part of the book as a locked online resource seems to diminish both the long-term prospects for this as a hardcover book and the promise that the book could be a good self-study guide. While the book will certainly be a valuable tool for instructors looking for a lucid guide to classic surface thermodynamics, the lack of answers to the study problems creates an obstacle to readers outside the classroom.
Reviewer: Karen Swider Lyonsresearches fuel-cell and battery materials and their integration into naval systems in Alexandria, Va., USA.
