This book is meant for students in their introductory heat transfer course — students who have learned calculus (through ordinary differential equations) and basic thermodynamics. We include the needed background in fluid mechanics, although students will be better off if they have had an introductory course in fluids. An integrated introductory course in thermofluid engineering should also be a sufficient background for the material here.
Our major objectives in rewriting the 1987 edition have been to bring the material up to date and make it as clear as possible. We have substantially revised the coverage of thermal radiation, unsteady conduction, and mass transfer. We have replaced most of the old physical property data with the latest reference data. New correlations have been introduced for forced and natural convection and for convective boiling. The treatment of thermal resistance has been reorganized. Dozens of new problems have been added. And we have revised the treatment of turbulent heat transfer to include the use of the law of the wall. In a number of places we have rearranged material to make it flow better, and we have made many hundreds of small changes and corrections so that the text will be more comfortable and reliable. Lastly, we have eliminated Roger Eichhorn’s fine chapter on numerical analysis, since that topic is now most often covered in specialized courses on computation.
This book reflects certain viewpoints that instructors and students alike should understand. The first is that ideas once learned should not be forgotten. We have thus taken care to use material from the earlier parts of the book in the parts that follow them. Two exceptions to this are Chapter 10 on thermal radiation, which may safely be taught at any point following Chapter 2, and Chapter 11 on mass transfer, which draws only on material through Chapter 8.
We believe that students must develop confidence in their own ability to invent means for solving problems. The examples in the text therefore do not provide complete patterns for solving the end-of-chapter problems. Students who study and absorb the text should have no unusual trouble in working the problems. The problems vary in the demand that they lay on the student, and we hope that each instructor will select those that best challenge their own students.
The first three chapters form a minicourse in heat transfer, which is applied in all subsequent chapters. Students who have had a previous integrated course thermofluids may be familiar with this material, but to most students it will be new. This minicourse includes the study of heat exchangers, which can be understood with only the concept of the overall heat transfer coefficient and the first law of thermodynamics.
We have consistently found that students new to the subject are greatly encouraged when they encounter a solid application of the material, such as heat exchangers, early in the course. The details of heat exchanger design obviously require an understanding of more advanced concepts — fins, entry lengths, and so forth. Such issues are best introduced after the fundamental purposes of heat exchangers are understood, and we develop their application to heat exchangers in later chapters.
This book contains more material than most teachers can cover in three semester-hours or four quarter-hours of instruction. Typical one-semester coverage might include Chapters 1 through 8 (perhaps skipping some of the more specialized material in Chapters 5, 7, and 8), a bit of Chapter 9, and the first four sections of Chapter 10.
We are grateful to the Dell Computer Corporation’s STAR Program, the Keck Foundation, and the M.D. Anderson Foundation for their partial support of this project.
JHL IV, Houston, Texas
JHL V, Cambridge, Massachusetts
August 2003