Slow Progress, with Open Courseware Links

I’ve been traveling quite a bit so the book-writing has gone slowly. However, now summer is over (it is raining in Seattle today, which is the end of summer as far as I’m concerned), and I’m getting back to work. My first activities have been to try Comsol Multiphysics 4.0. To do that I ran the sample case Comsol provided, and then started to solve the problems in the first edition of my book. That proved a bit difficult, so I have more to learn before I can explain that program to a novice. So far I’ve solved the three problems in Ch. 8 (chemical reactors) that use Comsol. I had to get help from Comsol for two of them. Hopefully I can be a quick learner. Meanwhile I’m reading in the microfluidic literature so that I can create some great projects for undergraduates and beginning graduate students, ones involving mixing in serpentine channels, situations with flow that stops and starts to create concentration slugs, sequential reactions that produce higher yields and less by-product in microfluidic situations than in beakers, Joule heating in electrokinetic applications (and the dispersion it causes), and mixing in a variety of geometries.

The second edition is going to have more numerical analysis, too. Long ago I created some web pages that explain basic concepts, and they still might be of interest:

http://faculty.washington.edu/finlayso/ebook/, Prof. Bruce Finlayson

http://www.RavennaPark.com/

Also, there are several open courseware options. The MIT open courseware is now handled through OpenCourseWare Consortium: http://ocwconsortium.org/

Introduction to Numerical Analysis in Engineering, Prof. George Schmidt

Numerical Analysis Applied to Chemical Engineering, Prof. Kenneth Beers

Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations,

Profs. Boo Cheong Khoo, Jacob White, Jaime Peraire, Anthony Patera

Finite Element Analysis of Solids and Fluids

Profs. Do-Nyun Kim and Klaus-Jürgen Bathe

There is also open courseware at RiceConnexions. (Rice University is my alma mater.): http://cnx.org/

Numerical Simulation by George Hirasaki

Maybe with these links you won’t need the second edition of my book! But, I’m betting you save time (if you are a student) and money (if you are working) by reading it and working the examples.

Bruce A. Finlayson

ChemEComp@gmail.com