Fluid Mechanics for Engineers

The contents of this book covers the material required in the Fluid Mechanics Graduate Core Course (MEEN-621) and in Advanced Fluid Mechanics, a Ph. D-level elective course (MEEN-622), both of which I have been teaching at Texas A&M University for the past two decades. While there are numerous undergraduate fluid mechanics texts on the market for engineering students and instructors to choose from, there are only limited texts that comprehensively address the particular needs of graduate engineering fluid mechanics courses. To complement the lecture materials, the instructors more often recommend several texts, each of which treats special topics of fluid mechanics. This circumstance and the need to have a textbook that covers the materials needed in the above courses gave the impetus to provide the graduate engineering community with a coherent textbook that comprehensively addresses their needs for an advanced fluid mechanics text. Although this text book is primarily aimed at mechanical engineering students, it is equally suitable for aerospace engineering, civil engineering, other engineering disciplines, and especially those practicing professionals who perform CFD-simulation on a routine basis and would like to know more about the underlying physics of the commercial codes they use. Furthermore, it is suitable for self study, provided that the reader has a sufficient knowledge of calculus and differential equations. In the past, because of the lack of advanced computational capability, the subject of fluid mechanics was artificially subdivided into inviscid, viscous (laminar, turbulent), incompressible, compressible, subsonic, supersonic and hypersonic flows.