• Journal of Engineering Education Research
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.3-6
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• 2018

A few thermodynamics texts are commonly found to have unrealistic example problems in which the process violates the second law of thermodynamics. This error would result from presentation order in the text which introduces first the first law for cycles, systems, and control volumes and then the second law later. In the presentation order, the example problems deal only with the first law without telling whether the process violates the second law. To correct this erroneous situation, it could be recommended to present the first law and the second law successively so that both laws could be applied simultaneously to the given example problems.