I must say I have to disagree with some of the reviews in the post below:
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Lectures: Professor Vasili has a tremendous mathematical background. So expect a lot of mathematics in this class. Having said that, it is up to you to decide whether an engineering class should or should not be math-heavy. My personal view (shared by many) is that while this class might seem to be too much math, it is essentially making you dig down to the very fundamentals of thermodynamics and from there on, build theorems and come to conclusions that the textbook has merely stated.

Homework: Homework assignments are huge (35% of grade). However, Prof Vasili is accommodating with due dates - that makes it better. Most of your learning in this class will come from doing homework. You are made to combine thermodynamics with mathematics- not just take equations from textbooks, plug numbers in and print results.

Exams: Fair, graded generously. Mostly based on homework.

All in all, this is a great class. It seems a little too much in the beginning, but as the quarter progresses, it gets better. Don't let the homework overwhelm you.
His pamphlets are rich with information. You don't need to memorize anything for this class. (Except maybe "GENERATION = IN + OUT - ACCUMULATION").

There is absolutely no question that this is a very different class - it is something you would expect in an engineering-heavy school. And that, I believe, is good.

Again, for all the hard work you do, grading is very generous.

At the end of the class, you will appreciate the fact that you took a class that was in so many ways different than most classes taught here at UCLA. Take it.

Professor Manousiouthakis seems like a cool guy and is clearly top notch in his mastery of all things related to the course, but I think the structure of the class sucks. The three homeworks are essentially the whole course and they are super hard so most students resort to just getting it from a smarter friend. One night, I was so stressed out doing homework two that when my girlfriend called me, I just broke up with her. Professor, please reconsider the organization of your course to keep people more engaged and actually learning, and babe, if you ever see this, blame Vasilios for everything.

Vasilios Manousiouthakis is an incredibly intelligent professor. While his homework sets were full of the hardest problems I've ever done in my life, I truly feel like I learned something in this class. Even though each homework set would take well over a week (with some problems takings well over a full day to complete), he was fair with extending each set based on students' needs as well as fair grading on exams. The one huge downside of this class is if you hate spending hours of your time on a single line of equations. In the end, however, if you put in the work and time, you will absolutely learn something and be rewarded for it.
Lectures are important to go to because even though he does like to ramble on about random stuff, there is important information you'll receive at some point.

Vasilios is a very nice man who seems to know a ton about Thermodynamics. The problem is he is not able to relay his knowledge to his students well. The homework sets take forever and tend to be very difficult and long. I did well grade-wise in the class, but I feel as if I did not learn a single new thing. I feel that anything I could do in that class was from prior knowledge (i.e. integration, ideal gas law, etc.). He seems like he really wants us to succeed, but everything started off as confusing and never reached a point where it made a great deal of sense. I liked him as a person and he would probably be a great mentor, but I would not take him again as a professor.

Vasili is an awesome professor. You don't have to take notes, he posts handouts of the lecture, so you can just focus on listening and understanding the materials. He is a very intelligent person, and he's the only Chem-E professor who actually cares about his student's learning. His homeworks are tough and take forever, but you learn a lot while doing them. Definitely form study groups to do the homework together. They are all typed, so you type all the proofs on mathtype, but this is good because you can copy and paste them. Also either invest in a good printer or know where the ones on the hill are, you will be printing probably 2-3 inches of paper for the final. Tests are open note, open book, basically bring anything you want, including homework solutions. You can't get less than a C on the midterm, they made 30% and lower a C. He curves to the lowest student so make sure you help each other out!

Look, Vasilios is a nice guy. He's pretty funny, and his lectures are entertaining, but most of the time you're just copying down needless notation. I like his sass. The class is curved well, and the midterm averaged a 60 (even though it's open book open note and 40 points of it were basically copy paste from the HW, so it was pretty chill). However, I don't recommend him at all. We were saved by our TA Kelly, who made things semi-understandable. Otherwise, go to Vasilios for help on HW and you're out of luck. He just makes everything way too mathematical and confusing. We're chemical engineers, not mathematicians! No need to make things so complex. Often, he pulls problems form the book, and I look at his solutions and compare them to book solutions. There's just no need for so much math notation.

Also, Homeworks are absolutely brutal. 150+ pages throughout the quarter of typed equations and formulas for this class. Also, the final was destructive. You don't need to study for the final because it won't help you anyway. He gives an "easy", a "thinking" and a "tedious" problem on each exam. The easy and thinking problem on the final were fine, but that tedious problem was soooooo long. I used 15 pages on that final (only front side but still - it took forever).

Overall, you can't avoid him, so just enjoy the ride! He's funny, I always enjoyed lecture, the homework sucks and is infinitely confusing and tedious, and the exams will leave you feeling empty inside. But then you get an A+ and it's all okay :)

Also, he took two extra weeks past the deadline to put in grades, so just a heads up. Overall, I'll give him a 3 rating. Not very clear, very difficult class, not very helpful, but at least it was fun. I also feel pretty solid on the material I learned from his class (solely because I had to teach myself a lot of it, and the material is pretty fun and interesting).

I took this class and got an A. Super challenging class. I changed majors however and the 102A did not cover the thermodynamics requirement for my biochemistry major. I tried emailing the professor to get the old syllabus so that I could petition the class to get credit however he is not responding. If anyone remembers their TA's or their emails I would greatly appreciate trying to get in contact with them so I could get the syllabus. Any help appreciated! CCLE doesnt allow me to access the class websites of old classes...

It’s a standard Vasily class: Lectures are 90% math, and 10% concepts.Homework assignments are mostly math with a sprinkling of thermodynamics. Workload occasionally gets heavy at times, but you get a free A.

Now as a disclaimer, I took this class during the COVID-19 pandemic. That means I didn’t take any midterms; we only had 3 homework assignments and one project.

The first homework was very long, and very tedious. Besides 2 questions that one would normally find in Vasily’s ChE 102A class, one question involved getting hundreds of thousands of data points from NIST, and graphing them. Not the best use of our time, although fortunately, I got 100% by only turning in some of the data (about 300k data points) without graphing anything. The next two homework assignments were much easier, being nerfed versions of ChE 102A homeworks. They, alongside the project, used COMSOL software, which ranged from hard to nearly impossible to use with Remote Desktop.

Tl;dr: Workload was insane in the beginning, but lightened off greatly as the quarter progressed. We even got to do homework assignments as groups.

2/3 of the lectures were math lectures, about esoteric technicalities. 1/3 of them were interesting though; we actually learned about cutting-edge Hydrogen technology So I’d recommend doing something else while listening to lecture. If it’s just math, you can tune it out but if the lecture is interesting, you can actually pay attention.

Discussions were COMSOL tutorials, which were hard to follow along from Zoom and Remote Desktop.

Hydrogen is a free A, but prepare to be utterly slammed from time to time. Lectures are optional and either teach you math or cutting-edge hydrogen technologies.

This class was by the far the worst class I have ever taken here at UCLA due to lack of structure and care of the professor. The only reason any of us survived the class was due to the amazing TAs that went above and beyond for us.
However, Vasily was a terrible professor in so many ways. He lacked any organization in his lectures and would spend very unequal times covering topics. The homeworks were pointless. Easily spent 12+ hours on each homework, just typing time-consuming equations that were not necessary in learning the fundamental concepts of thermo. He once assigned a homework problem that even he and the TAs could not solve and didn't revoke it until a couple days before the due date. He cares more about the class reputation rather than whether or not students are actually learning.

At the end of the day, I learned NOTHING about thermo from this class. If I did learn anything, it was about chain rules and partial derivatives. Although this is helpful, it is a thermodynamics class and I kinda wished I learned at least some thermo.

Avoid this class with him at all cost. It is worth rearranging your entire year schedule to avoid him.

Vasili's thermo class was very demanding but you will learn a lot and that is what matters in the long run. Understanding the material and completing the homework may take you quite awhile, especially if you need to do some math review or are not very familiar with Matlab or Excel. However, that process of reviewing all your past math skills and then incorporating them to solve a problem is precisely what makes this class so rewarding and useful. After all, isn't this what the learning process is all about? Problem solving and understanding new concepts will never be easy, but the skills and confidence you gain in the process is definitely worth it. Vasili does a great job of making you think, putting all your calculus classes to great practical use, and enhancing your computer/problem solving abilities (ie. using tools in Excel you never knew about before that are actually really great to get to know). Bottom line: work hard and good luck- this class is an amazing learning experience and you will learn tons from Vasili if you put in the effort!