The First and Second Laws, conduction, convection, and radiation, heat exchangers, steam systems and boilers, refrigeration basics, and where mechanical systems actually lose energy.
Every energy balance a mechanical engineer runs — a boiler's fuel input, a pump's shaft work, a chiller's coefficient of performance — traces back to the First Law, and every efficiency ceiling those systems bump into traces back to the Second Law. This module builds both laws up from first principles, then applies them directly to the equipment mechanical engineers actually specify: heat exchangers, boilers, steam distribution, and vapor-compression refrigeration.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why a counterflow heat exchanger can outperform a parallel-flow unit with identical hardware, why a heat pump's coefficient of performance can legitimately exceed 1.0, and where the highest-return, lowest-cost energy efficiency measures actually live on a real plant floor.