Customer Reviews

Multimedia Fluid Mechanics - Multilingual Version CD-ROM

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I purchased this CD-ROM to support my studies in an undergraduate upper division fluid dynamics class. What a disappointment and exercise in frustration.

The multimedia aspects are thin and overwhelmed by text. Picture a 2-D coordinate system with an animated particle moving along a simple curve....this animation repeats over and over. In the 60 mins. I spent going thru the CD-ROM I encountered no sound, no speech. The interface consists of tabbed or sequencial windows loaded with textbook type and simple illustrations or 6 second clips of fluid flow.

The disc covers only basic concepts. Granted, I didn't finish the CD-ROM but where's the Reynold's Transport Theorem, etc.? They present the Navier-Stokes equation but say much less than I've read in my textbook.

This multimedia disc is about 10% of what it could be.

On top of this, the disc is a real memoy hog and does not run smoothly. The readme file owns up to this and advises users to quit all other programs while running it. I use a Powerbook with a G4 processor and 2 Gb of RAM, but the program still ran slow and jerky and the movie clips stuttered. The stated Mac requirements for this CD-ROM are a G3 and 64 MB of RAM. Huh? Good luck!

Don't believe the stellar reviews on the back cover. This disc is dull.

Fluid mechanics is a notoriously difficult subject and unless you are blessed with a highly gifted teacher, then it is likely that you will have trouble visualising some of the concepts. Equations on the page are sometimes just not enough to convey the dynamics of what is going on with some concepts.

This CD-ROM does a superb job of making plain some of the core theorems and equations. For example the section on the stream function is alone worth the price of this CD-ROM, since it explains beautifully why the equation is defined in the way that it is, and shows a video of a flow which illustrates the concept.

Some of the comments in the other reviews have some validity - the content could have been 10 times greater, because Fluids is a *massive* subject, but then the price would have been 10 times greater (and I would pay for it! Now there's a gauntlet!) I don't find any of the animations dull - after all, this isn't entertainment, this is education of basic principles. Perhaps these people find algebra dull too?

Also I had no problems playing the animations. They were a little slow whilst loading but once loaded they were fine.

Also when people award one star, what are they comparing it against? It's not really fair to compare with source on the Internet, as some people don't have masses of time to search or the proper bandwidth for it - some people just need all of the information in one place. Now, to my knowledge, this CD-ROM is unique - there is nothing like it. Please correct me if I'm wrong!

I would give this five stars, if there were some lectures on this CD-ROM, which I would have thought been trivial to include. There's nothing quite like a human talking in front of a blackboard to convey some kind of passion for a subject.

after attending some lectures in which movies and simple demonstrations of fluid motions were used creatively, i thought by owning this CDROM i would have in my collections some interesting pictures and movies of fluid dynamics. instead i found that the materials were unbelievably trivial and boring. don't believe me? buy it or loan it from a library and see for yourself.

you can find much much better fluid galleries on the web. unfortunately amazon doesn't let me insert links. try google 'physics of fluids andrews aopp' and 'GFD lab rhines university of washington' and find the links from there.