ME 6601: Introduction to Fluid Mechanics
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Module 0
Table of Contents
Slide 1 – Course Introduction
Slide 2 – Contact Information
Slide 3 – Course Text and CD-ROM
Slide 4 – Course Content – Topic Coverage
 Slide 5 – Course Grade Determination
Slide 1 – Course Introduction
Welcome. My name is Professor Paul Neitzel and I am a faculty member
here at the George Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering
at Georgia Tech, and this ME6601: Introduction to Fluid Mechanics.
This course is provided for two purposes: as an introduction for fluid
mechanics at the graduate level for the students of engineering.
In order to provide you with background for taking further specialty courses
in the subject of fluid mechanics, and also to provide a student who is not
necessarily a specialist in the discipline of fluid mechanics an overview of
the subject for use in other kinds in other kinds of coursework, say,
in the thermal sciences or in design. Now I want to emphasize that the
course is at the graduate level, which means that the level of mathematical
rigor that we use in developing the material in this course is at a higher level
than typically encountered in undergraduate courses.
Consequently, we are going to have to take a little bit of time at the
beginning of the course to equip you with some of the tools you will need in
order to follow the subsequent lectures.
Slide 2 – Contact Information
Some contact information: my name, mailing address, and telephone number
for both voice and fax, and my email address are on this slide.
You may also contact me through the course WebCT site. So if you need to
get in touch with me, these are the usual means by which you can reach me,
and I usually (typically) respond very quickly to email queries from
students. So that may be the most effective way to get in touch with me
during the course.
Slide 3 – Course Text and CD-ROM
There is a text for the coursework. It is titled Incompressible Flow, by Ron
Panton, who is a professor at the University of Texas-Austin.
It is published by Wiley-Interscience. We are using the second edition of the
text. Although, I point out in the second book that the text is really meant as
a reference and as a source for supplemental suggestive reading. The lecture
notes that I’m going to be using have been developed over the course of
about twenty-two years of teaching this subject, and are therefore a little bit
different both a little bit in content and the approach taken to the course.
Particularly, some of the mathematical notation taken will be different from
what you see in the Panton text, and the level, or the approach taken to,
certain subjects is also different from that which you will find in the text.
But I think you will see that the text is a valuable one and is going to be a
useful addition in you personal library.
Slide 4 – Course Content – Topic Coverage
In addition to the text, we are going to be using a brand new CD-ROM,
entitled Multi-Media Fluid Mechanics, which was prepared by Homsy et al.,
and published in the year two-thousand by Cambridge University Press. This
CD is a collection of video clips and snippets of material on various subjects
in fluid mechanics, and from time to time I will point you to various points,
various locations on that CD, for you to look at.
We unfortunately cannot do video clips live during the lectures and so some
of the video clips on this CD are useful and you will be able to look at them
offline.
Lets talk about the topic coverage we are going to be looking at this term.
We are going to start out with some preliminary and introductory concepts.
Under preliminaries, we’ll do an introduction to the subject of Cartesian
tensors. You may not be familiar to Cartesian tensor notation,
but it’s a notation which provides a lot of economy in terms of deriving
some of our basic principles. And so if you have not seen Cartesian tensors
before, you needn’t worry, everything we are going to be using in respect to
the Cartesian tensor notation we shall derive in class and shall present in
class.
We’ll talk about some introductory concepts, about material and special
frames of reference, and then we’ll move into kinematics,
and spend a couple of modules on that subject. We then need to derive all
the governing equations. We’ll be focusing our attention on incompressible
flow in this course although we will do some compressible flow toward the
end, and so for incompressible flow we are going to need the equation of
conservation of mass and balance of linear momentum, Newton’s second
law of motion. We’ll talk about the boundary conditions that need to be
applied and other supplementary conditions such as initial conditions.
Following that, we’ll begin our study of viscous flows, with a treatment of
exact solutions. There are lots of exact solutions that are available to us in
studying viscous flows,
and we will catalog some of these. I’m not going to work them all out in
detail. In fact, I will assign as homework for you to work out some of these
solutions.
After we finish with viscous flows, we’ll talk about inviscid flows, and in
the category of inviscid flows we will be introducing Bernoulli’s equations,
and we’ll talk about potential flow, potential flow being the flow of a perfect
fluid. We may have some time to talk about water waves, but that has yet to
be seen.
Then we will investigate the subject of boundary layers. We’ll be talking
about Laminar boundary layers first, we’ll briefly discuss integral methods
that are applied to studying Laminar boundary layers, and then we will look
at local methods which actually treat the full partial differential equation.
No course of fluid mechanics at the introductory level would be complete
without an introduction to turbulent flow. It’s a very difficult subject that
warrants at least an entire course of its own, but we’ll be doing an
introduction to the subject to provide you with some background to have an
idea how turbulent flows get analyzed in practice. And then we’ll be briefly
discussing compressible flow from the standpoint of so-called onedimensional gas dynamics.
That’s about all we have time for in this particular course, and its going to
round out our treatment of the material.
Slide 5 – Course Grade Determination
Now, the question students frequently ask is,
“How is my grade going to be determined in this course?” Your grade is
going to be determined from your performance on the homework
assignments that are made, and on a final examination. I typically in a
graduate level course do not give a midterm examination.
I’d rather use the homework as some interim measure of your performance.
The homework is going to be assigned somewhat irregularly, after certain
modules have been completed. They won’t necessarily be assigned to
accompany each of the modules. I have to wait until we’ve got a certain
amount of material under our belts in order to make the homework
assignment that would be meaningful for you.
The purpose of the homework is not just to provide you with busywork, but
to provide you with problems to work one that implement the lecture
material.
And the format for the final examination is always something that I do on
the fly. It’s either going to be proctored, or its going to be take home.
It depends on the kind of material, on the way we have been treating the
material throughout the course of the term.
However, I will announce well before the end of the semester whether the
final examination for the course will be a proctored exam,
and by that I mean what would be an in class exam for those students who
are on campus, or whether it will be a take home examination that you will
have to work on for yourself. It’s going to be in each student’s best interests,
therefore, since there is some uncertainty as to how the final exam is going
to be delivered,
to prepare yourself, throughout your viewing of all these modules, as though
the final examination were to be a proctored final exam,
so that you might not have everything at your disposal for that examination.
So that is it for the overview of the course, and we will begin with a study of
the Cartesian tensors in the next module.