Video Lecture
The whole series is available as a single video with chapter markers. Each chapter page starts this video at that chapter.
Chemical Engineering Fluid Mechanics
Pressure, Flow Regimes, Friction, and the Machines That Move Fluids
Nearly everything in a chemical plant is a fluid being moved — feeds pumped, gases compressed, products piped. Pressure drop is money, and flow regime decides how well everything downstream mixes, transfers heat, and reacts. This course opens the transport-phenomena arc of our chemical engineering curriculum: momentum transfer first, continuing in our Chemical Engineering Heat Transfer series, and completed by Chemical Engineering Mass Transfer and Separation.
Series Overview
- Hold — fluid properties and the hydrostatic pressure field
- Trade — Bernoulli and the mechanical energy balance: pressure, speed, and height exchange
- Sort — the Reynolds number splits every flow into laminar or turbulent
- Pay — the friction factor turns flow into an operating cost
- Drive — pumps and compressors matched to the piping system
& Statics"] --> B["Energy
Balance"] B --> C["Reynolds
Number"] C --> D["Friction &
Pressure Drop"] D --> E["Pumps &
Systems"]
Chapters
| Chapter | Title | What You Will Learn |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Fluids, Pressure, and Statics | Density and viscosity, hydrostatics, gauge vs absolute pressure, continuity |
| 2 | Bernoulli and the Mechanical Energy Balance | The pressure-speed-height trade, Torricelli, flow measurement, friction and pump work |
| 3 | Laminar, Turbulent, and the Reynolds Number | Reynolds' experiment, Re and flow regimes, Hagen–Poiseuille, why industry runs turbulent |
| 4 | Pipe Flow and Pressure Drop | The Darcy friction factor, the Moody chart, a worked pumping-cost design, fittings |
| 5 | Pumps and Piping Systems | Centrifugal vs positive displacement, operating point, NPSH and cavitation, compressors |
Who This Series is For
- Students continuing from our Chemical Engineering Introduction and Thermodynamics series into the transport-phenomena core
- Engineers and researchers who size pipes, select pumps, or debug flow problems and want the reasoning behind the correlations
- Data scientists working with plant flow, pressure, and power data who need the physics those signals obey
Recommended preparation: Chemical Engineering Introduction; the Thermodynamics series helps for the energy and vapor-pressure connections. Mathematics stays at algebra with a few worked calculations.
Related Series
Part of the classical-fundamentals track with Chemical Engineering Introduction and Chemical Engineering Thermodynamics. The transport arc continues in Chemical Engineering Heat Transfer and completes in Chemical Engineering Mass Transfer and Separation. The data-driven companions are Process Informatics Introduction and Introduction to Process Monitoring and Control.