This is a course website to support the teaching of Fluid Mechanics at Lee University.
The Basics
- My profile on Meet the Prof
- A little more detailed profile about me and my career in engineering
- The legacy site of the department of the Church of God I worked at for 13 1/2 years
Textbooks, Main and Supplementary
Textbooks are expensive, this course is no exception. Many students rent their textbooks only to discover they vanish with DRM when they need them the most. This is to help you get around that problem. Book titles in bold are available in print.
- Course Textbook: Applied Fluid Mechanics 8th Edition, by Joseph Untener and Robert Mott. I’ve spent much of my career trashing textbooks, but this is one the best engineering textbooks (for its objectives) I have ever used. An earlier edition was very helpful in helping me to improve my Fluid Mechanics Laboratory. If I had been educated with this while working in this place, it would have saved me a great deal of heartburn. Earlier editions of this are great too.
- Downloadable Textbooks
- Smith’s Mechanic (1863.) My great-grandfather’s (at right) Statics and Dynamics textbook at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. one of the premier engineering schools in the U.S. When it was taught (and for many years afterwards) solid and fluid mechanics were taught in “one shot,” unlike the way we do it now. It paid off: he had a successful career as a naval architect.
- Mechanics (1978) by S.P. Strelkov. Another “one-shot” textbook.
- Hydraulics and Fluid Mechanics by E.H. Lewitt. Old but good.
- Engineering Power Tools. An excellent program for all kinds of information, unit conversions, pipe and structural sizes, and many other items.
Topical Articles for Various Parts of the Course
Note: all of the labs from the virtual course Fluid Mechanics Laboratory are linked to below as “video” links. They’re more than that: they include the procedures, data spreadsheets, and links to helpful ways of processing the data and understanding the theory behind the labs.
- The Nature of Fluids and the Study of Fluid Mechanics
- Viscosity of Fluids
- Pressure Measurement
- Forces Due to Static Fluids
- Buoyancy and Stability
- Flow of Fluids and Bernoulli’s Equation
- General Energy Equation
- Fluid Mechanics Laboratory Video: Flow Meters, Minor Losses and Pipe Losses (Moody Chart). This experiment covers many of the topics we deal with in this course, including energy losses, flow measurement, manometers, minor losses, and use of the Moody chart.
- Reynolds Number, Laminar Flow, Turbulent Flow, and Energy Losses Due to Friction
- Velocity Profiles for Circular Sections and Flow in Noncircular Sections
- Vulcanaire Supertherm. An example of a simple shell and tube heat exchanger.
- Minor Losses
- Series Pipeline Systems
- Parallel and Branching Pipeline Systems
- Pump Selection and Application
- Hydraulic Vibratory Hammer: the Foster 4200. A very practical overview of a fairly simple fluid power system (simple in principle, but the harsh application made it difficult at times)
- Open-Channel Flow
- Flow Measurement
- Fluid Mechanics Laboratory Video: Rotating Drum. This is more of a demonstration of the pitot tube; the pitot-static tube gets its workout in the Propeller experiment below
- Forces Due to Fluids in Motion
- Drag and Lift
- Fans, Blowers, Compressors, and the Flow of Gases
- Compressible Flow Through Nozzles, and the Vulcan 06 Valve. A topic that doesn’t quite get the coverage in the book it deserves
Chet Aero Marine 