Applied Transport Phenomena

Overview: In many processes in (bio)chemical industrial, as well as in health and energy related applications, fluid flow, heat transfer, mass transfer, and chemical reactions interact in a complex way. These equations can relatively easily be described by differential equations, but their solution requires substantial computational requirements without providing insights into the system at hand. To reduce complexity, generic rules are taught in ATP with an emphasis on simplification and deriving valuable interpretations about the underlying operation of the system. Concepts such characteristic times, scales and regimes are dealt with to simplify problems enough to make them tangible or solvable analytically. Several techniques are also introduced for finding approximate solutions to partial differential equations of transport phenomena systems.

Content:

The course content is split into three sections:

1. A recap of key course material but with an Applied perspective.

2. A Methods section that teaches simplifying concepts including Scaling, Reduction in Dimensionality and Timescales, Perturbation Theory and Self-Similarity

3. An applications section that covers a set of common physical systems. This section also combines conservation laws to apply the concept of Scaling across equations.