Customer Reviews

Finite Difference Methods in Heat Transfer

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An engineer is constantly engaged in a battle where he tries to balance having enough books on his desk in order to appear well-read, yet not so many as to dilute his collection of "good books." Finite Difference Methods in Heat Transfer is one of those books an engineer cannot be without. It presents the content with an emphasis on solving partial differential equations, i.e. the Poisson and Laplace equations of heat and mass transport, by numerical means, which is ultimately the topic of interest to the practicing engineer.

The book is organized by chapter into methods for solving PDEs of the elliptic, parabolic, and hyperbolic type; in 1, 2, and 3 dimensions. Each is given a thorough treatment, and the author's knowledge of the the FDM shines as he concisely links the physical meaning of various transport phenomena to its respective term in the PDE. By delineating an otherwise obscure parabolic differential equation into its unsteady, convection, diffusion and source terms, the author imparts an understanding of differential equations that goes beyond a purely mathematical treatment.

The first chapter delves heavily into developing a conceptual understanding of the problem (PDE's), but the book takes off from there. The computational methods described in the book are first-rate, and many of them can be implimented in Excel. With that said, I am confident the reader could be setting up grids and making finite difference approximations the first day of owning this book. The "computational molecule" approach the book takes lends itself well to grid generation in a spreadsheet, although it is not explicity mentioned by the author. The book also includes Fortran code for a Thomas algorithm and domain decomposition algorithms, among others, in the appendices.

All in all, I can't tell you what an outstanding reference this is. I know it's one of the most expensive books on transport phenomena out there, but let me be the first to say it's worth every penny!