Multicomponent Mass Transfer (Wiley Series in Chemical Engineering)

Rating:
Summary: A new way of looking into mass transfer
Review: The book starts by deriving the Maxwell-Stefan equations, the correct framwork to deal with multicomponent mass transfer problems and comparing it with the more traditional approaches to multicomponent mass transfer. Some chapters on estimation of diffusivities and mass transfer coefficients follow. In the second part, the book jumps into interphase mass transfer, where the theory is fully applied to derive "working equations". These chapters treat in a unified way all the problems that previously requieres empricial, approximate or separate treatments. The chapter on simultaneous heat and mass transfer is particularly good.

The book has a third part on design, where the focus is set on practical aspects of the theroy developed in previous chapters. It has "real life" examples on distillation, absorption and condensation, and many other applications are treated as exercises. This helps the reader to get in touch with the applications of the theory.

This is a book useful for advanced students, scientists and engineers who want to go a step further in their understanding of the physical principles behind mass transfer. The book is very balanced between theory and application and provides the basis for extending the theory to any mass transfer problem ever imagined. The book is very concise, and always thinks about the usefulness of the theory, there are no useless things here. It comes with a disk with the problems solved in MathCad, something that proves very handy.

I liked the book very much, and I think it is much better than the traditional books on the field, which looked more like cookbooks that engineering books. This book is going to be a classic. Highly reccomended.