Problem Solving For Engineers and Scientists: A Creative Approach

Let's assume that you, the reader, have been educated in the basics of science and perhaps some branch of engineering. You have access to textbooks and handbooks, and you are comfortable with a computer. One day, you find yourself faced with a technical problem. If this problem happens to be essentially identical to a previous problem, which you were trained to solve, clearly you will have no difficulty. Unfortunately, however, the variety of technical problems that you might encounter is enormous. The chance is small that a given problem will be an exact replica of a familiar problem. In such a case, it is possible that you will reach out for the first relevant quantitative relationship that occurs to you. You then might substitute numbers into a formula and obtain an answer, perhaps with the aid of a computer or hand calculator. As the many examples in this book will demonstrate, your answer is quite likely to be wrong because you have overlooked some important aspect of the problem. You can easily convince yourself of this fact by tackling some of the problems in this book.

Table of Contents:
1 Water, Water Everywhere.- 1.1 Of Time and the River: Speedboats.- 1.2 Of Time and the River: Sailing.- 1.3 Floating on the Pond.- 1.4 The Bubble in the Water Tank.- 1.5 The Bottom of the Lake.- 1.6 When Will the Puddle Evaporate?.- 2 Some “Elementary” Problems.- 2.1 When Do I Add the Cream to my Coffee?.- 2.2 The Hot-Air Balloon.- 2.3 How Far Can an Airplane Fly?.- 3 What is the Chance that …?.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.2 Division By 137.- 3.3 The Turbine Seals.- 3.4 The Keys to the Taxicabs.- 4 Unstable Behavior.- 4.1 Introduction.- 4.2 The Solid-Propellant Rocket.- 4.3 Boiling Water With a Hot Wire.- 4.4 A Catalytic Particle.- 5 Finding the Optimum.- 5.1 Introduction.- 5.2 Draining the Tank.- 5.3 Insulating the Electric Cable.- 5.4 Minimizing Automobile Collisions.- 5.5 Hitting a Golf Ball.- 6 Some Scientific Curiosities.- 6.1 Surface-to-Volume Ratio.- 6.2 The Leaning Tower of Pisa.- 6.3 Absolute Temperature.- 6.4 A Matter of Gravity.- 6.5 Letting Air Into an Empty Tank.- 6.6 The Two Capacitors.- 7 Violating the Laws of Thermodynamics.- 7.1 Introduction.- 7.2 Underwater Rotating Device.- 7.3 Electrolysis of Water.- 7.4 A Submarine That Needs No Fuel.- 7.5 Steam and Ethylene Glycol.- 7.6 An Odd Case of Radiative Exchange.- 8 Some Propagation Processes.- 8.1 A Weak Shock Wave.- 8.2 Melting Through Ice.- 8.3 Combustion Wave in a Thermite Mixture.- 8.4 Flame Propagation in a Combustible Gas.- 9 A Lecture on Dimensionless Groups.- 9.1 Mach Number.- 9.2 Froude Number.- 9.3 Reynolds Number.- 9.4 Grashof Number.- 9.5 Euler Number and Bernoulli Equation.- 9.6 Barometric Formula.- 9.7 Weber Number.- 9.8 Other Dimensionless Numbers.