Transport Phenomena and Unit Operations: A Combined Approach
TRANSPORT PHENOMENA AND UNIT OPERATIONS: A Combined Approach
R. G. Griskey, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY, 448 pp., $99-95,2002
The idea of integrating transport phenomena and unit operations is a laudable one, inasmuch as these subjects are not mutually exclusive, as is too often assumed, but are indeed continuous and complimentary. This book addresses a broad range of topics within the general areas of fluid mechanics, heat transfer, mass transfer, staged operations and mechanical separations. It is aimed at the uninitiated student, and includes an impressive array of problems at the end of each of the fourteen chapters, as well as a large number of worked examples. However, the expectation that one book of moderate length can do adequate justice to such a broad range of topics is a bit overoptimistic. Due to the extensive breadth of coverage, the depth is quite limited, to the extent that developments, derivations and explanations of the origin and significance of many of the relations presented tend to be cursory or superficial and even, in some cases, misleading. There are also a number of errors or misprints that, hopefully, will be corrected in subsequent printings. The “transport” components of the book (i.e., transport coefficients and the microscopic conservation equations for molecular transport) comprise a relatively small part of the book, which is probably in suitable proportion to the fraction of practical systems amenable to analysis by these methods. The vast majority of the book is devoted to more-or-lessclassical unit-operations subjects. These include: incompressible flow in conduits; packed beds; mixing; conduction, convection, boiling, condensing and radiation heat transfer; heat exchangers; diffusion and convective mass transfer; equilibrium staged operations, including binary distillation (with a brief discussion of multicomponent distillation), packed absorption and extraction columns and leaching; filtration; centrifugation; sedimentation; and cyclone separations.
The material is mostly classic and the methods simplified based on graphical or empirical tools. Some of the material is current, but some is also outdated, with better or more accurate methods being available. For the beginning student or the non-chemical engineer, this book does provide a good introduction to a wide range of chemical engineering related topics, but should not be construed as the most complete or current treatment of the subjects covered.
Ron Darby, PhD, PE
Professor Emeritus of Chemical Engineering
Texas A&M Univ.
College Station, TX