Physical Transport Phenomena

The course Physical Transport Phenomena covers the essential aspects of both fluid flow, and heat and mass transfer at an introductory level, offering you a starting point for your future careers in atmosphere, ocean, and solid earth.

First, we will look at the basic principles of fluid flow, starting with the different processes that influence the flow and combining them into the conservation equations for mass and momentum. From here, we will treat laminar flow, where attention will be paid to specific examples, including Hagen-Poiseuille flow, Couette flow and Darcys Law. Afterwards, non-dimensional analysis and dimensionless numbers (e.g., Reynolds) are introduced and the topic of turbulence is explored briefly. Bernoulli's Law and the macroscopic energy balance, which are useful for a broad range of engineering applications are treated. Subsequently, attention is focused on heat transfer and the equation for the conservation of energy is derived. Covered subjects include balances for simple heat-transfer problems and different transport mechanisms for heat, for example, heat conduction, convective heat transfer, and radiation.

During the course, the strong link between education and recent research/realistic practice in engineering will be emphasized. This will be done by giving examples from realistic geophysical flows: hydrological, atmospheric, oceanic, and subsurface applications.