(308c) The Role of Computation in Continuum Transport Phenomena

AIChE was 50 years old before computation became significant in chemical engineering transport phenomena. Perry's Handbook, 4th edition in 1963, described the Euler method, Adams method, and a simple Runge-Kutta method for solving ordinary differential equations. The treatment of partial differential equations was limited to diffusion/heat conduction problems in two dimensions or unsteady problems in one dimension. But none of these methods were described in the Sections on Fluid Flow or Heat Transmission, so they must not have been important to practioners. The book by Luther, Carnahan and Wilkes, 1969, provided more compete treatments of these techniques. However, it was the impact of computers that allowed implicit methods and large matrices that permitted expansion of the solution of transport problems using numerical techniques. The talk will illustrate some of the key advances in chemical engineering transport phenomena computation by illustration with applications done by the author and his students as well as others.