Mathematical Methods In Chemical Engineering Varma And Morbidelli Pdf

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Aug 08, 2019 Chad rated it really liked it

A review of a textbook? For real, I'm gonna put this one out there.

I didn't get in the habit of reading textbooks cover to cover until graduate school. What changed? It was the irritation with never really fully grasping a topic its entirety; if you just do the homeworks, pay attention in class, you can get a good grade, but you won't be an expert. In addition, I liked the freedom it gave me: I didn't even need to take a class at all if I could just read the textbook.

I picked up Morbidelli's Mat

A review of a textbook? For real, I'm gonna put this one out there.

I picked up Morbidelli's Mathematical Methods of Chemical Engineering for the graduate math course in my chemical engineering department that I will be teaching this next quarter. I had some trepidation in taking on such a course, because I actually never took it (It's a required course in the degree program, but I got approved to take an alternate course through the applied mathematics department in order to take an elective I was really set on). I thought it imperative that I take the time to read the whole textbook cover to cover. I got to choose the textbook this year, and I had three options from the two professors who taught the course previously. I selected this one, because an online version is available through our university library system.

The main thrust of the book is giving engineers a toolset to solve PDEs and ODEs. This isn't a theoretical course, so we don't really probe the bounds of what can actually be solved: we stick to practical problems that an engineer is likely to encounter, filled with mass and heat transfer problems, dimensionless numbers, and the like. The book also sticks to the traditional approach to solving ChemE math problems: series solutions, series solutions, series solutions. From what I can gather, this is potentially less useful these days, and more are leaning towards computational approaches? But I think series solutions are here to stay, just because they really are elegant, and they really make sure you understand the math and the theory of differential equations.

Like most math textbooks, they can be hard to follow if you aren't careful. I got through it pretty well by coding up the derivations and example problems in Jupyter notebooks (check out my repo here). Overall, a great textbook, and it helped me anchor a lot of topics that had seemed unclear before (like boundary layer theory, for instance). It was a LOT less intimidating than other ChemE textbooks I've read, like Deen's Analysis of Transport Phenomena. It isn't too dense, and it never introduces an equation or topic without telling you where it came from first.

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