Introduction to Thermal and Fluids Engineering

I studied chemical engineering as an undergraduate over 15 years ago. I am working on a masters degree in thermal fluids engineering. This text was used for a review/ramp course that covered some thermodynamics, some fluid mechanics and some heat transfer. The concept of teaching these subjects in an integrated course with an integrated textbook is new (to me at least). If you don't like this integrated pedagogy, you will likely find many faults with the book. When solving real world engineering problems, I find the most useful skill is to combine knowledge from multiple disciplines and integrate them. A lot of my undergraduate curriculum went into heavy derivations and details that have not been very useful in my career as an engineer. However, learning the key concepts from each subject, and then combining to solve interdisciplinary problems is very valuable to me. The trade-offs for this text and for this integrated approach is the sacrifice of detail and rigor. The sections on thermodynamics were spot-on for the key concepts that mechanical engineers would need, but would be totally inadequate for chemical engineers (no mention of fugacity or activity, no development of equations of state, no coverage of chemical potential, etc.) The sections on fluid mechanics were practical and handy for actually solving flow in conduits and external flow problems; they also provided good physical descriptions of the phenonmena, but they were clearly lacking in rigor in development and derivation. Also, no coverage of dimensional analysis and similarity, turbomachinary nor compressible flow were included. That would be appalling to a fluids expert, but still enough of the general concepts were conveyed to facilitate learning those other areas from other sources. The heat transfer sections were very good at convering a lot of subjects with minimal pages. In the few chapters on HT, I can find almost all of the steady state conduction, transient conduction, convection, correlations for Nusselt numbers, and radiation that are covered in a 900 page text dedicated to HT alone. All in all this is a very efficient text. I found this textbook to be very good at its intended purpose. However, for more complete coverage of any of the three topics dedicated textbooks would be needed. Depending on your needs and your curriculum this book could be ideal or just frustrating. By the way, I found it very handy to have all the appendices that contain the thermophysical properites for solids, liquids and gases in one book. I use the tables quite frequently for other classes and work related calculations.

The cover looks official and the text is correct, but the pages themselves seem to be average printer paper, and the printing is poor resolution and has some extra ink in white spaces. It didn't impact my ability to read the text and is still worth the discounted price, but was a mild annoyance.

Seems like all the pages have been copied from another book. Counterfeit? Pages are clear and readable however.

The class sucks and this book makes me cry.

This is an excellent text. I used it during the course of the same name at Rensselaer Poytechnic where the authors teach. It presents a unified conceptual approach to thermodynamics, fluid mechanics and heat transfer. It's presentation and organization is very clear and well illustrated. I lent it to a friend of mine after I completed the course and decided it was an essential to my library as a practicing engineer and purchased my second copy of it.

Not too bad of a textbook. It's the only thermo class that I need so it's pretty basic. I recommend having a basic fluid mechanics class to understand a few of the concepts in this book, but it's not critical.

Back cover has two cracks.The content is ok.I am a steering system engineer,I need to keep every thing good and safe.

met all my wishesConditions was as listed on the display, no problems found would order again if I find the need.

Kinda damaged.