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Within industry, piping is a system of pipes used to convey fluids (liquids and gases) from one location to another. The engineering discipline of piping design studies the efficient transport of fluid.

Industrial process piping (and accompanying in-line components) can be manufactured from wood, fiberglass, glass, steel, aluminum, plastic, copper and concrete. The in-line components, known as fittings, valves and other devices, typically sense and control the pressure, flow rate and temperature of the transmitted fluid and usually are included in the field of piping design (or piping engineering). Piping systems are documented in piping and instrumentation diagrams (P&IDs). If necessary, pipes can be cleaned by the tube cleaning process.

Piping sometimes refers to piping design, the detailed specification of the physical piping layout within a process plant or commercial building. In earlier days, this was sometimes called drafting, technical drawing, engineering drawing and design but is today commonly performed by designers that have learned to use automated computer-aided drawing or computer-aided design (CAD) software.

Plumbing is a piping system with which most people are familiar, as it constitutes the form of fluid transportation that is used to provide potable water and fuels to their homes and businesses. Plumbing pipes also remove waste in the form of sewage and allow venting of sewage gases to the outdoors. Fire sprinkler systems also use piping and may transport nonpotable or potable water, or other fire-suppression fluids.

Piping also has many other industrial applications, which are crucial for moving raw and semi-processed fluids for refining into more useful products. Some of the more exotic materials used in pipe construction are Inconel, titanium, chrome-moly and various other steel alloys.

Thermodynamics is a branch of physics concerned with heat and temperature and their relation to other forms of energy and work. The behavior of these quantities is governed by the four laws of thermodynamics, irrespective of the composition or specific properties of the material or system in question. The laws of thermodynamics are explained in terms of microscopic constituents by statistical mechanics. Thermodynamics applies to a wide variety of topics in science and engineering, especially physical chemistry, chemical engineering and mechanical engineering.

Historically, thermodynamics developed out of a desire to increase the efficiency of early steam engines, particularly through the work of French physicist Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1824) who believed that engine efficiency was the key that could help France win the Napoleonic Wars. Scottish physicist Lord Kelvin was the first to formulate a concise definition of thermodynamics in 1854 which stated, Thermo-dynamics is the subject of the relation of heat to forces acting between contiguous parts of bodies and the relation of heat to electrical agency.

The initial application of thermodynamics to mechanical heat engines was extended early on to the study of chemical compounds and chemical reactions. Chemical thermodynamics studies the nature of the role of entropy in the process of chemical reactions and has provided the bulk of expansion and knowledge of the field. Other formulations of thermodynamics emerged in the following decades. Statistical thermodynamics, or statistical mechanics, concerned itself with statistical predictions of the collective motion of particles from their microscopic behavior. In 1909, Constantin Carathéodory presented a purely mathematical approach to the field in his axiomatic formulation of thermodynamics, a description often referred to as geometrical thermodynamics.

Applied fields

• Atmospheric thermodynamics
• Biological thermodynamics
• Black hole thermodynamics
• Chemical thermodynamics
• Classical thermodynamics
• Equilibrium thermodynamics
• Industrial ecology (re: Exergy)
• Maximum entropy thermodynamics
• Non-equilibrium thermodynamics
• Philosophy of thermal and statistical physics
• Psychometrics
• Quantum thermodynamics
• Statistical thermodynamics
• Thermoeconomics
• There are two types of thermodynamic instruments, the meter and the reservoir. A thermodynamic meter is any device which measures any parameter of a thermodynamic system. In some cases, the thermodynamic parameter is defined in terms of an idealized measuring instrument. For example, the zeroth law states that if two bodies are in thermal equilibrium with a third body, they are also in thermal equilibrium with each other. This principle, as noted by James Maxwell in 1872, asserts that it is possible to measure temperature. An idealized thermometer is a sample of an ideal gas at constant pressure. From the ideal gas law pV=nRT, the volume of such a sample can be used as an indicator of temperature; in this manner it defines temperature. Although pressure is defined mechanically, a pressure-measuring device, called a barometer may also be constructed from a sample of an ideal gas held at a constant temperature. A calorimeter is a device which is used to measure and define the internal energy of a system.
• A thermodynamic reservoir is a system which is so large that its state parameters are not appreciably altered when it is brought into contact with the system of interest. When the reservoir is brought into contact with the system, the system is brought into equilibrium with the reservoir. For example, a pressure reservoir is a system at a particular pressure, which imposes that pressure upon the system to which it is mechanically connected. The Earth’s atmosphere is often used as a pressure reservoir. If ocean water is used to cool a power plant, the ocean is often a temperature reservoir in the analysis of the power plant cycle.