Customer Reviews

Engineering Fluid Mechanics

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This text is a great introduction to Fluid Mechanics. The derivations are very easy to follow, and the problems apply to many real life situations. For graduate students, it may be a little to light weight, but for undergrads it provides a broad base of information.

This text was used in a class where I was the teaching assistant. There were numerous complaints from students about how the text was difficult to follow, and in some cases the examples were even incomplete. This was a class for junior engineering students as a first thorough course in fluids, the text was not helpful. As a graduate student I found it to be a good reference of basic concepts (although, it was hard for me to follow some of the examples). It even goes in depth with many concepts. All in all it is a good basic reference, but totally inadequate for beginning instruction.

As a note to instructors, the solution manual is loaded with errors.

I took my undergrad fluid mechanics course using Crowe's lightweight doorstop. I took the course from Dr. Crowe himself. He certainly knows his fluid mechanics but if you go by his course and this book then he does not seem the least bit interested in handing down his knowledge to his students. At the time, about 2 years ago I gave this a 3/5 rating based upon my own naive assumption that I had a solid undergraduate background in fluid mechanics thanks to diligently studying and reading everything in this text. But it really took a graduate level fluids course to make me realize the serious deficiencies in this textbook. Save your hard earned money this book deserves zero stars and here's why:

The major drawbacks of the text are
1. No development of the differential forms of the govering equations. Conservation of mass, momentum and energy are all developed using the integral approach (via Reynolds Transport Theorem). He mentions the Navier-Stokes Equations in barely 2 pages and there is no further discussion about it. You could tear those pages out and you wouldn't lose continuity in the book (pun intended). No theoretical development thereafter requires the Navier-Stokes Equations. No surprise that solutions to the Navier Stokes equations are not included except for Couette and Poiseuille flows which are developed without the classical methods of simplifying the NS equations.

2. Lack of substantial mathematical sophistication. Fluid mechanics is best described with vector calculus and differtial equation. Surely there are many problems that are solvable with algebraic methods but Crowe essentially avoids anything mathematical. Therefore problem sets are suitably simplified so as to be amenable by the simplest mathematics. This is partly a consequence of doing away with the differential approach.

3. No mention of stream functions or potential flows!

4. This book misleads the novice into thinking that the panacea of all fluid mechanics problems is Bernoulli's equation. That is all you will really need to solve the problems in this text (apart from looking at the many tables, charts and graphs to find friction factors, drag coefficients, head loss factors and what have you). The unsteady form of Bernoulli's equation is left out; a consequence of omitting potential flows. The reader isn't told that Bernoulli's equation is a simplification of Euler's equations (only shown in streamwise co-ordinates) which are themselves a simplification of the Navier stokes equations.

5. There is very little development of fluid kinematics. No mention of the Langrangian derivative (and if there was it was again perfunctory and disposed off never to be recalled again). Vorticity is mentioned in passing and a few problems assigned which ammount to doing a bunch of cross products! The interplay between fluid rotationality (or irrotationality), viscosity (or lack of viscosity) and incompressibility and how they lead to the special (read: simpler) forms of the governing equations (namely Euler's and Bernoulli's equation) is omitted. Fluid element deformations and stress-strain arguments are left out in the cold (no need for them if you are washing your hands off of the differential approach).

5. Boundary layer theory is developed without stressing the classical length scale arguments that go into them, turbulence is restricted to using empirical correlations.

All these deficiencies in concept and mathematics were corrected only after I took a graduate level fluid mechanics course which essentially amounted me having to relearn everything considered "prerequisite" in addition to keeping up with the new material. Thoroughly deserves 0 stars. Don't take my word for it, use the book preview at Amazon.com and check out the table of contents. I suggest comparing this with the highly recommended undergraduate texts by Fox & Macdonald, or Munson, Young and Okiishi, or Frank White's excellent undergraduate text.

Good textbook, good examples, and easy to read. Anyone with a solid physics & calculus background will be comfortable with this book.

I had to buy this book for a course in fluid mechanics last semester, which turned out to be one of my favorite courses. That was due mainly to the fact that I had an amazing professor, but it was largely supported by the ease of use of this book. Reference sheets were quick and easy to use, and proved themselves invaluable when I had to look up numbers or equations in stressful times. The presentation of the material is very clear, and written in a way that is easy to understand so you can focus on the theory and the ideas, not on running to get a dictionary to look up big, complex words and their meanings (...not that an engineer would own a dictionary...or know how to use a non-internet-based one, lol).

WARNGING! CUIDADO! My only real point to pick with this book is that someone did a poor job editing it. The layout of the chapter problems is such that the diagrams for some are on different pages than the accompanying text, or located several problems before or after in the most awkward positions, meaning you really have to pay attention to the figure number to prevent drawing the wrong picture/information (which I have done several times).

And, to make matters worse, some problems actually don't have all the info needed to complete them! Several problems had info cut off, or just not present, in their diagrams.

While those are just temporary, minor annoyances and shouldn't deter anyone from buying this book, just be aware that they are present. That's the only reason this got a 4 instead of a 5.

The book is easy to read however, it is very hard to solve the problems. The author does not do a very good job showing which equation's are used. In the example problems the author bring's in values which are constant's but does not indicate what the values are and the units. It is a very hard text book to follow. However the derivation of the formulas are done very well.

I will preface this by saying that I haven't gone out and searched every fluid mechanics book to find something better. I never deal with fluids and I never plan to deal with them again. The only thing I found that was useful from this book was Bernouli's equation, but you can learn everything on that topic from free references rather than paying for this book. I found the book to be confusing, poorly worded, and lacking in real-world examples and example problems. The text is boring and found in abundance, and I simply don't have the attention span or the desire to read a wall of text about fluid mechanics. I got an A in the class, but it wasn't because of this book. Thank goodness I never have to pretend to care about fluids again.

I am writing this as an engineering student at Brown University, RI, USA. I think it is helpful -and less biased- when students write reviews of the books they are using.

This is a well-written book that covers all the appropriate material to be taught in an introductory Fluid Mechanics course in an engineering curriculum. In my opinion, the format of every chapter is clear and gradually guides the reader to grasp the essence of the concepts included. It includes plenty of figures to illustrate several phenomena or to help derive equations. Some figures are confusing though and need to include more discussion.
The Appendices of the book are clearly labeled and easy to use; this is true for figures, graphs and tables. I believe that this is very important since I used books in the past which included very unorganized tables and I couldn't figure out what I was looking for!
There are many problems at the end of every chapter ranging from basic to more complex ones. Problems are grouped according the way the chapter is divided into concepts. Perhaps the book lacks general conceptual problems and/or real-life application problems, but our Professor provided this material.

Overall, I would recommend this textbook to other students who are interested to get a smooth and paced introduction to Fluid Mechanics and to teachers who want to supplement their lecture with a reliable study-guide.

You better hope your professor is good because reading this book is awful. Chances are that if you're looking at buying this it's because it is required for you course.

It has some good examples in it but the question wording can be a little difficult to understand what the author is asking for. Not much different from the previous edition.