Fluid Flow, Heat & Mass Transfer

This first part of the course Introduction to Aerospace Engineering presents an overall picture of the aeronautics domain. This overview involves a number of different perspectives on the aerospace domain, and shows some basic principles of the most important concepts for flight. Then the basic aerodynamics are covered, followed by flight mechanics.

The course “Fluid Flow, Heat and Mass Transfer,” course number ta3220, is  third-year BSc course in the program of Applied Earth Sciences at Delft University of Technology.  Students in this class have already taken a course in “Transport Phenomena” in the second year, and “Fluid Flow Heat and Mass Transfer” is designed as a follow-up to that class, with an emphasis on topics of importance in applied earth sciences, and in particular to Petroleum Engineering, groundwater flow and mining.

In practice, however I start over again with first principles with this class, because the initial concepts of the shell balance are difficult for students to grasp and can always use a second time through.  The course covers simple fluid mechanics problems (rectilinear flow) using shell balances, for Newtonian and power-law fluids and Bingham plastics.  Turbulence for Newtonian fluids is covered in the context of friction factors for flow in pipes, flow around spheres and flow in packed beds.
In heat transfer we start again with shell balances for solving simple steady-state conduction problems.  Thereafter, special attention is given to unsteady and multidimensional heat conduction, since the equations are similar for unsteady flow in aquifers and petroleum reservoirs.  The concepts of orthogonal conduction and superposition are emphasized, as well as ways to treat perfectly insulated boundaries.
The final topic in heat transfer is estimation of heat-transfer coefficients in flow in tubes. Although no other geometries are treated explicitly, I hope students recognize certain principles they can apply to other situations.
We cover mass transfer only lightly, and only as by analogy to heat conduction: unsteady diffusion (by analogy to unsteady head conduction) and mass transfer in tubes (by analogy to heat transfer in tubes).
The course seeks to emphasize intuitive and physical understanding of concepts and goes relatively lightly on math.  In the study of unsteady conduction, for instance, students are not required to solve the partial differential equations, but to use and combine tabulated solutions to solve for temperature or heat transfer as a function of time in various geometries.
There is a laboratory exercise in the class, which is not shown in the lectures.  The lab description is provided on the OpenCourseWare site, and one lecture discusses how to use the data in the lab to do the calculations in the report.  In this problem students measure the heating of rectangular solid blocks from a cylindrical heater.  Mathematically, this process of unsteady heat conduction is similar to Darcy flow in a well test in a geological formation.
From 1989 to 2006 I taught a similar course at The University of Texas at Austin; that course had course number PGE 322K, entitled “Transport Phenomena in Geosystems Engineering.”  A similar course I taught to graduate students was PGE387L.  You may see references to these course numbers in some places in the lecture notes.  The subjects covered in those courses differ a bit from what is taught in ta3220.  As a result; you may, for instance, see a homework problem scratched out among the worked problems.  In that case, the reason is that given problem is on a subject not covered in ta3220.

I thank Niels Noordijk for his tireless support of the project of formatting the course for OpenCourseWare, and the OpenCourseWare staff at Delft University of Technology for their help.  Finally, I thank Delft University of Technology for providing support for the formatting process.

W. R. Rossen
Delft University of Technology
Sept. 2013