β Scribed by F.J. Zuiderweg
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
THIS is the first comprehensive textbook in French on chemical engineering, or at least on chemical engineering as the field is viewed by readers of this iournal. It is a wholly new book on the-unit operations, written at a time when there is much introspection as to how and whether to continue to teach unit operations as such. The appearance of LONCIN'S work is timely, because much needed; up-to-date in its approach and its extensive bibliography, and yet timeless, in that the operations he treats are the indispensable tools of chemical processing in any epoch and on any scale.
Dr. LONCIN is professor in the Centre des Industries Alimentaires at Brussels, and has done extensive research in centrifugation and sterilization operations, hydrolysis, hydrogenation of fats, fermentation, and processing of milk products.
This book is geared particularly well to the needs of students and engineers in French-speaking countries, in terms both of their actual technical problems and of the other reference texts most accessible to them. (Included are short but cogent sections on phase equilibria and on materials of construction, which might often be omitted from a unit-operations text.) The author has carved out a consistent and extensive notation, and his text will contribute measurably to the standardization of French terminology in chemical engineering (and to the French technical vocabulary of non-French-speaking engineers). Numerical illustrations are used liberally, to indicate typical behaviour; short tables of numerical constants are occasionally provided. The book does not have the illustrative solutions to problems found in many texts, nor does it include a collection of exercises for the student-reader.
A long opening chapter provides a unified approach to heat, material, and momentum transfer. The laminar and turbulent flow regimes are discussed, and boundary-layer theory is introduced briefly. The Navier-Stokes equations are given, and are particularized in several laminar-flow situations.
The "transfer unit" is introduced to describe both heat-transfer and material-transfer processes; once defined, it is used later in distillation and in drying of solids. Fluid mechanics is carried to the point of defining pressure drops for flow inside pipes; flow through packed beds, and sedimentation and fluidization, are treated in later chapters. Again reflecting the general and abstract approach of the first chapter, heat-transfer apparatus is covered later in the sterilization and evaporation chapters. MKS units are adopted and defined, and a brief explanation is given of the use of dimensionless groups.
The remaining chapters utilize a relatively standard unitoperations approach, drawing upon the first chapter wherever possible, and also giving considerable practical information on typical equipment. In order, these chapters deal with (2) extraction, including absorption and leaching; (3) sedimentation; (4) centrifugal separation, including cyclones; (5) filtration, including centrifugal filters and gas
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