Mathematical modeling is the art and craft of building a system of equations that is both sufficiently complex to do justice to physical reality and sufficiently simple to give real insight into the situation. Mathematical Modeling: A Chemical Engineer's Perspective provides an elementary introduction to the craft by one of the century's most distinguished practitioners.
Though the book is written from a chemical engineering viewpoint, the principles and pitfalls are common to all mathematical modeling of physical systems. Seventeen of the author's frequently cited papers are reprinted to illustrate applications to convective diffusion, formal chemical kinetics, heat and mass transfer, and the philosophy of modeling. An essay of acknowledgments, asides, and footnotes captures personal reflections on academic life and personalities.

* Describes pitfalls as well as principles of mathematical modeling
* Presents twenty examples of engineering problems
* Features seventeen reprinted papers
* Presents personal reflections on some of the great natural philosophers
* Emphasizes modeling procedures that precede extensive calculations

Ever since the seminal works on traveling waves and morphogenesis by Fisher, by Kolmogorov, Petrovski and Piscunov, and by Turing, scientists from many disciplines have been fascinated by questions concerning the formation of steady or dynamic patterns in reactive media. Contributions to this volume have been made by chemists, chemical engineers, mathematicians (both pure and applied), and physicists. The topics covered range from reports of experimental studies, through descriptions of numerical experiments, to rather abstract theoretical investigations, each exhibiting different aspects of a very diverse field.

When a dynamical system has a large number of parameters it is not possible to get a completely comprehensive picture of all the types of behavior that it may display and one must be content with surveying the system along various corridors of lower dimension. Using an example with three differential equations and six parameters it is shown how the available methods of singularity theory, bifurcation analysis, normal forms, etc. can be used to build up a picture of varied and interesting behavior. The model is a generalization of the Gray-Scott reaction scheme in a single stirred vessel to a two-phase reactor consisting of a reaction chamber and a reservoir communicating with each other through a semi-permeable membrane. Two forms exist according as to whether A is fed to the reactor and B to the reservoir or vice-versa, and show interesting differences of behavior. Both models undergo Hopf bifurcations, pitchfork transitions, have homoclinic orbits, take the period doubling route to chaos and one gets there by intermittency. Besides being of interest to mathematicians as an ecological study of a differentiable system, it is hoped that, though idealized, the fact that it corresponds closely to a real type of reactor will make it attractive to control engineers and others as a testing ground for their various methods and devices. This book will be of particular interest to students and researchers in mathematics and engineering , particularly those working in bifurcation or chaos theory.

Ever since the seminal works on traveling waves and morphogenesis by Fisher, by Kolmogorov, Petrovski and Piscunov, and by Turing, scientists from many disciplines have been fascinated by questions concerning the formation of steady or dynamic patterns in reactive media. Contributions to this volume have been made by chemists, chemical engineers, mathematicians (both pure and applied), and physicists. The topics covered range from reports of experimental studies, through descriptions of numerical experiments, to rather abstract theoretical investigations, each exhibiting different aspects of a very diverse field.

Introductory text for engineers, physicists and applied mathematicians applies mathematics of Cartesian and general tensors to physical field theories, demonstrating them chiefly in terms of the theory of fluid mechanics. Many exercises throughout the text. Index. Preface. Appendixes.