Short description:

This book is a superb tool in virtually all application areas involving the Kinetic Theory of Gases, Rarefied Gas Dynamics, Transport Theory, and Aerosol Mechanics. It has been especially designed to serve a dual function, both as a teaching instrument either in a classroom environment or at home, and as a reference for scientists and engineers working in the fields of Rarefied Gas Dynamics and Aerosol Mechanics.

Long description:

The transport of a given species (atoms, molecules, neutrons, photons, etc. ), either through its own kind or through some other host medium, is a problem of considerable interest. Practical applications may be found in many technologically and environmentally relevant areas such as the transport of neutrons in a nuclear power reactor or in a nuclear weapon, the transport of ions and electrons in plasma, the transport of photons which constitutes radiative heat transfer in various industrial, environmental and space applications, the transport of atoms or molecules of one species either through itself or as one component of a multi-component gas mixture, and the interactions of such gas mixtures with various solid and liquid surfaces such as one might find associated with capillary tubes, aerosol particles, interstellar dust grains, etc. . These application areas are obviously quite broad and it is readily apparent that there are, indeed, few scientific activities that do not require some level of understanding of transport processes. One of the most important and influential texts in the area of transport theory has been The Mathematical Theory of Non-Uniform Gases by Sidney Chapman and T. G. Cowling that was first printed in 1939. This book, along with several other more recent texts (Hirschfelder, J. O. , Curtiss, C. F. and Bird, R. B. , Molecular Theory of Gases and Liquids, John Wiley and Sons, NY, 1954; Kogan, M. N.

From the reviews:

"The aim of the present work is to present a concise ? introduction to the field of transport theory with a fairly tight focus on a few recently successful analytical solution techniques. ? the book is useful as a reference for scientists and engineers working in the fields of rarefied gas dynamics and aerosol mechanics, of working in any applied discipline in which gas-surface interactions can be expected to play a significant role." (Claudia-Veronika Meister, Zentralblatt MATH, Vol. 1141, 2008)

Table of Contents:

From the contents

Table of Tables. Table of Figures. Preface. Acknowledgments. 1. The General Description of a Rarefied Gas. 2. The Boltzmann Equation. 3. The Collision Operator. 4. The Uniform Steady-State of a Gas. 5. The Non-Uniform State for a Simple Gas. 6. Regimes of Rarefied Gas Flows. 7. The Free-Molecular Regime. 8. Methods of Solution of Planar Problems. 9. The Variational Method for the Planar Geometry. 10. The Slip-Flow Regime. 11. Boundary Value Problems for All Knudsen Numbers. 12. Boundary Slip Phenomena in a Binary Gas Mixture. Appendix 1. Bracket Integrals for the Planar Geometry. Appendix 2. Bracket Integrals for Curvilinear Geometries. Appendix 3. Bracket Integrals for Polynomial Expansion Method. Appendix 4. The Variational Principle for Planar Problems. Appendix 5. Some Definite Integrals. Appendix 6. Omega-Integrals for Second-Order Approximation. References. Author Index. Subject Index.