Customer Reviews

Transport Phenomena Problem Solver (Problem Solvers Solution Guides)

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As an adjunct professor who teaches Transport Phenomena I purchased this book in the hope that it filled a void that has long existed in the area of solution books on transport phenomena; a good treatment of heat and mass transfer. The Schaum's outlines "Fluid Mechanics and Hydraulics" and "Fluid Dynamics" are good treatments of momentum transport. To its credit the book does include a significant number of problems in heat and mass transport as well as in the area of momentum transport. However the book does not live up to some of its claims:

1. "When students want to look up a particular type of problem and solution they can readily locate it in the book by referring to the index...

The not all of the problems are that easy to find. For example if one looks for transpiration cooling one is referred to problem 16-4 in the section on convective mass transfer. Admittedly this problem has aspects of mass transfer as well as heat tranfer but one would have expected to find this in the section on convective heat transfer (e.g. Transport Phenomena by Bird, Stewart and Lightfoot). Also the index fails to point to another transpiration problem that is solved in chapter 6 (Boundary layer flow and drag force). This is an even more unlikely place to find such a problem. There are a number of other examples of "misplaced problems" which casts some doubt on the editor's expertise in Tranport Phenomena.

2. The book claims to overcome a limitation of most texts namely that of presenting example problems in "abbreviated form which leaves out material between steps and requires that the students derive the ommitted material themselves".

This approach seems to be applied very selectively. Those problems in which the ommitted material is relatively trivial and straightforward are solved in gory detail (see for example problem 6-14). However for problems in which the intermediate steps are not so obvious (see problem 11-10) the intermediate details are omitted. Problem 11-10 is a verbatim repititon of example 10.5-4 in the above mentioned book by Bird et al.) It discusses dimensional analysis of a natural convection problem. Bird et al. appear to choose rather arbitrarily a non-obvious form for the dimensionless quantities used to simplify the transport equations. It would have been useful to explain how these quantities were derived but this opportunity is missed completely.

Overall this book is a reasonably good compilation of a number of classic problems in Transport Phenomena and as such is a handy "one stop shopping" type of reference for teachers. In my rather brief perusal of the book I did not see any new and exciting problems being introduced. Also I don't see this as being a useful learning tool for students since it does not add much to the current solutions that already exist in standard texts on the subject. In fact as a didactic tool it falls far short of the Schaum's outline series in that it presents only problems and solutions with not supporting theoretical discussion.

I'm a Ph.D. student in Chemical Engineering. I needed a study guide for my qual. and thought 'how bad could this book be?'... Well... It's BAD~!... Just get yourself a BSL (Bird, Stewart, and Lightfoot) and solve their examples. After all, REA just copied all the examples right out of the BSL.

This item was sent to my old adderss even thogh I had sent you my new adderss.

It is true that this book has many drawbacks compared to a full-fledged textbook and it does not deliver all it promises to in the foreword, but it is cheaper than BSL and may serve as an overview of the field for the curious beginners who do not want to spend a great deal of money on BSL and are reasonably proficient in physics. Furthermore, we do not know who copied the examples from whom: BSL from REA or REA from BSL.

Overall this book appears to be a good reference, however, i did not use it very much while taking the class.

This book has zero usability. It is not an adequate source of reference for any course pertaining to transport phenomena. You would have better luck using the internet to help you get past advanced problems with which you struggle, as this book is poorly organized and has little to offer to the student of any course beyond the introductory level.