Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

One goal of qualitative physics is to capture the mental models of engineers and scientists. This paper shows how Qualitative Process theory can be used to express concepts of engineering thermodynamics. This encoding provides the means to integrate qualitative and quantitative knowledge for solving textbook thermodynamics problems. These ideas have been implemented in a program called SCHISM, which analyzes thermodynamic cycles, such as gas turbine plants and steam power plants. W e describe its analysis of a sample textbook problem and discuss our plans for future work.