Preface
This book arose out of a need that frequently faced us, namely coming up with
problems to use as homework in our classes and to use for quizzes. We have found
that many otherwise excellent textbooks in transport phenomena are deficient in
providing challenging but basic problems that teach the students to apply transport
principles and learn the crucial engineering skill of problem solving. A related
challenge is to find such problems that are relevant to biomedical engineering
students.
The problems included here arise from roughly the last 20–30 years of our
collective teaching experiences. Several of our problems have an ancestry in a
basic set of fluid mechanics problems first written by Ascher Shapiro at MIT and
later extended by Ain Sonin, also at MIT. Roger Kamm at MIT also generously
donated some of his problems that are particularly relevant to biomedical transport
phenomena. Thanks are due to Zdravka Cankova and Nirajan Rajkarnikar, who
helped with proof-reading of the text and provided solutions for many of the
problems.
For the most part, the problems in this book do not involve detailed mathematics
or theoretical derivations. Nor do they involve picking a formula to use and then
plugging in numbers to find an answer. Instead, most of the problems presented
require skills in problem solving. That is, much of the challenge in these problems
involves deciding how to approach them and what principle or principles to apply.
Students will need to understand how to pick a control volume, and that multiple
control volumes are necessary for some problems. How does one deal with a
moving control volume? How many principles need to be applied to solve a
given problem? How do you know whether your answer makes sense? Students
who are struggling or stuck on a particular problem will want to know how they
should proceed in such cases. The problems presented here will raise all of these
issues for students.
In the first chapter, we give general principles of problem solving, and present the
Reynolds transport theorem. We also show an example of how we would approach
and solve one problem. However, problem solving is best learned by doing prob-
lems. Seeing someone else solve a problem is not nearly as educational. We hope
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Cambridge University Press
978-1-107-03769-4 - Problems for Biomedical Fluid Mechanics and Transport Phenomena
Mark Johnson and C. Ross Ethier
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