An Introduction to Engineering Thermofluids

This textbook provides a concise and clear incremental evolution of the introductory fluid mechanics and thermodynamics knowledge for first and second year engineering undergraduates. If you are a first or second year student of mechanical, chemical, aeronautical, marine or civil engineering this book is for you. Also this book is a suitable (and cheap) text for other science degrees where core knowledge of fluid mechanics and thermodynamics is required, for instance environmental science and meteorology. It may also help you if you are taking courses online. It is designed to support the lectures and examples you are given and help you answer the questions you are going to try to solve. It does not skip much, but there is not much padding. It does not seek to emulate the standard texts from the major publishers, which include lots of colour, examples, usually a vast array of web resources, DVDs and so on. I take the view that the lecturers who deliver your undergraduate course know their stuff and provide you with lecture slides which they explain, examples and other questions for you to try yourself. The book delivers the material incrementally, in more-or-less the order the students are actually taught the material over years 1 and 2. The challenge of developing a new introductory ’thermofluids’ course, and the dearth of well priced and appropriate textbooks on the subject inspired me to write my own. I also saw no reason to give the rights to a publisher when none of the material is new and self-publishing is so straightforward. Taking this route allows me to keep the cost down to a small fraction of the combined cost of the alternatives.

I'm a full professor at the University of Southampton, UK and have taught fluid mechanics and thermodynamics in various forms my entire career. I studied chemical engineering as a first degree, studied a mechanical engineering based PhD and have taught fluid mechanics and thermodynamics to first, second and third year undergraduates at Imperial College London and the University of Southampton, both top rated UK Universities. The second and third year courses were given to mechanical engineering students, whilst the first year course has been delivered to a cohort of 250 mechanical, aeronautical and ship science students. Currently the combined fluid mechanics and thermodynamics content is given to a cohort of 500 which now includes civil engineering students and students from the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research. In addition, I have taught fluid mechanics (turbulence) at graduate level at the University of Illinois at Chicago and aerodynamics to students at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. You can find more out about me at www.pnume.org.