This book is one of the best books I've come across as an undergraduate in Chemical Engineering. It presents the subject matter very well, in a nice, concise, well thought out order and layout. In addition, the text is unexpectedly not dense for such subject matter, and is very clear. Given some time with the book, reading is no problem! It gives ample practice problems and example problems. Only fault would be that it does not cover Stream Functions and Dimensional Analysis very well and that it sometimes does not give enough/good example problems for a few subjects. Overall though, a pleasure to use for the course!

The original BSL (red cover) edition contained a wealth of information and detailed derivations of each method. This new book is quite pathetic when compared to the original. Very little theoretical background and development is presented. Most of the useful reference material has been eliminated. Don't waste your money on this book. Buy the original.

The original BSL (red cover) edition contained a wealth of information and detailed derivations of each method. This new book is quite pathetic when compared to the original. Very little theoretical background and development is presented. Most of the useful reference material has been eliminated. Don't waste your money on this book. Buy the original.

Using this book as an undergraduate student, it really was hard for me to understand what it was telling me at first, but combined with a good professor I realized that the book was very readable and has detailed, consise information about transport processes. It also serves as a great reference to fluid mechanics and heat transfer courses.

Anyone who either teaches the subject Transport Phenomena in Chemical Engineering or related departments, or anyone who is involved in transport-related research, would know the importance of this book: it is simply the gold standard because it treated all the three transport subjects (Momentum, Heat and Mass) in one book. It is rare to find other textbooks that cover all the three subjects to the depth one wishes to be covered. I like the footnotes that are embedded at the bottom of the pages to provide quick information on how and when the particular Section or Chapter is developed by those who studied and formulated it. It also constantly reminds the reader about those pioneers in the field. This last point is particularly useful to researchers more than to the undergraduates. It is a textbook that survived the taste of time for nearly 50 years.

Transport Phenomenon by Bird, Stewart and Lightfoot is one of the most useful chemical engineering textbook ever written. For nearly five decades now, many chemical engineers have lived by what they learned first through this book. The revised edition makes the book current, though 1960 edition is great introduction to the mass, heat and energy and/or momentum transfer problems.

The basis idea of the book is simple: list the equations useful for a system of problems, say in mass transfer; provide set of assumptions used to arrive at those; suggest possible solutions to the differential equations for practical industry conditions; use correlations derived by researchers where real time data is unavailable and lastly, learn how to adapt solutions for different set of conditions. The book attempts to make problem solving into a set of instructions to be followed, and by sticking to the fundamental assumptions and equations allows one to attack a range of problems relevant to fields as diverse as diffusion transport, biochemical processes, condensation problems for atmospheric physics, chemical kinetics, heat conduction, petroleum extraction and flow of fluids relevant to many processing industries.

We often hailed it as the Bible of Chemical Engineering. Every now and then, (nearly a decade after we first read it) I still hear people say: this problem, or something like it, was in BSL, (the acronym awarded to the book after its authors). Be it Transport texts by Deen or Middleman typically used for graduate school courses, or Incompressible Flow by Patton, the recourse to understanding problems first hand through BSL is always rewarding.

The book comes with a number of solved and unsolved problems. There is no short-cut to becoming a good chemical engineer, except by mastering the art and science of attacking problems. By going through the book meticulously right in your first course, (for in most cases, this is the first chemical engineering text encountered), you can ensure that you will do well in your whole education as chemical engineer.

Recommended reference for all chemical engineers.

Most chemical engineers grew up with BSL. For myself, I found out what the graduate students were using. The old red-back version was intimidating. It was hard to use. The calculus was, and is, generally over my head. But... after reading through a few problems, the mathematics seemed familiar, the approach seemed to explain all my questions and the solution was, if not directly applicable, one that I could borrow for a difficult problem.

I remember once working on a product development for Andrew Jergens. My goal was to estimate the production capacity of a stepwise batch process. Others would ultimately use my numbers to estimate the price of the product. I had to get it right! One step involved melting this wax, a synthetic whale wax, over an electric heater. I knew the BTU output but there were several physical constraints. After a few sleepless nights and pawing through the University of Cincinnati library I was stumped. Then, I started looking through BSL.Oui la! There is a problem on de-frosting turkeys ¯ a real life practical application of heat transfer; supposedly, this is how Birdseye came up with the table you see on the outside of turkey wrappings on Thanksgiving.

It did not take me long to see the application. I spent a morning doing lab experiments for my physical properties and the afternoon fitting the measurements to their procedure. The method worked.

The second edition has much better graphics and a good index. The index and table of contents in the first edition made the book unwieldy.

I recently became interested in calculating the heat-up time in a hydrolysis bed. One of the crucial problems was calculating h', the volumetric heat transfer coefficient (BTU/hr-cubic feet-F: h X l). There is an excellent method developed by Shumann in another great book: Kern's "Process Heat Transfer." BSL presents a method for estimating h that can be transformed into h' by:
h' = h X Ac/V, where Ac=cross area; V=volume of bed. With the old version, finding this section of the book was very time consuming. The second edition made it easy.

There is one downside of the 2nd edition. To make it easier to read, the publisher increased its length and width. Unfortunately, as experience has born out, this tends to make a book more prone to shearing along its binding. I intent to wrap this book in heavy plastic to add some reinforcement. I suggest you do likewise.

I will keep you posted as I continue to use this book. I may give my old red-back to some younger engineer ---to knaw on the edges before they ask me for the answer.

Overall this is a good book for learning transport phenomena, however, if you are lacking in some of the fundamentals (fluids, heat, etc) some of the steps in the examples don't make sense. Once you have a grasp on the fundamentals, the book is very useful in breaking down transport problems.

Overall this is a good book for learning transport phenomena, however, if you are lacking in some of the fundamentals (fluids, heat, etc) some of the steps in the examples don't make sense. Once you have a grasp on the fundamentals, the book is very useful in breaking down transport problems.