Nsf Combined Research And Curriculum Development On Multiphase Transport Phenomena

Summary This curriculum development project on multiphase transport phenomena draws on the research experiences from nine research laboratories at The University of Akron, Michigan State University, and the University of Tulsa. The objective of the project is to develop a new curriculum for teaching undergraduate and graduate students multiphase computational fluid dynamics for advanced design. The impact of multiphase flow research on solving practical engineering problems is an integral part of the learning experience. Industrial participants in the project provide specific design problems related to emerging technologies. Students are taught the fundamentals of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) during a one-week workshop. This is followed by an Internet course on multiphase transport phenomena. The students work in teams on CFD design problems with a faculty and industrial mentor. The salient results of this NSF/CRCD project are presented in this paper. I. Introduction Courses on transport phenomena associated with multicomponent, single-phase fluids play a major role in training undergraduate and graduate students in chemical, mechanical, and petroleum engineering. However, like thermodynamics and other multidisciplinary courses, these academic offerings have been developed separately within each engineering discipline in order to emphasize applied problems encountered in each field. So far, student training in the area of transport phenomena for multiphase fluids has been limited to specialized courses and workshops. Consequently, important advances in multiphase flow research and analysis tend to remain isolated within a discipline. Moreover, access to post graduate courses on multiphase transport phenomena and particulate processing remains a difficult challenge for most graduates. Therefore, the objective of this NSF- Combined Research and Curriculum Development (CRCD) initiative is to bridge the gap between traditional training in fluid mechanics, heat transfer, and mass transfer received by most