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How This Book Was Written

This book started because I needed an explanation for manufacturing engineers. Apparently many manufacturing engineers and even some researchers in manufacturing engineering were lack of understanding about fluid mechanics in particularly about compressible flow. Therefore, I wrote to myself some notes and I converted one of the note to a chapter in my first book, ``Fundamentals Of Die Casting Design.'' Later, I realized that people need down to earth book about compressible flow and this book was born.

The free/open content of the book was created because the realization that open content accelerated the creation of books and reaction to the corruption of the court implementing the copyright law by manufacturing facts and laws. It was farther extended by the allegation of free market and yet the academic education cost is sky rocketing without a real reason and real competition. There is no reason why a textbook which cost at the very most 10$ to publish/produce to cost about 150 dollars. If a community will pull together, the best books can be created. Anyone can be part of it. For example, even my 10 years old son, Eliezer made me change the chapter on isothermal flow. He made me realized that the common approach to supersonic branch of isothermal as non-existent is the wrong approach. It should be included because this section provides the explanation and direction on what Fanno flow model will approach if heat transfer is taken into account¹³.

I realized that books in compressible flow are written in a form that is hard for non fluid mechanic engineer to understand. Therefore, this book is designed to be in such form that is easy to understand. I wrote notes and asked myself what materials should be included in such a book so when I provide consultation to a company, I do not need to explain the fundamentals. Therefore, there are some chapters in this book which are original materials never published before. The presentation of some of the chapters is different from other books. The book does not provide the old style graphical solution methods yet provide the graphical explanation of things.

Of course, this book was written on Linux (MicrosoftLess book). This book was written using the vim editor for editing (sorry never was able to be comfortable with emacs). The graphics were done by TGIF, the best graphic program that this author experienced so far. The old figures where done by grap (part the old Troff). Unfortunately, I did not have any access to grap and switched to Grace. Grace is a problematic program. Finally, the gle is replacing the old grace. So far, it seems much better choice and from version 0.4.8 all will be done using GLE. The spell checking was done by gaspell, a program that cannot be used on new system and I had to keep my old Linux to make it work¹⁴. I hope someone will write a new spell check so I can switch to a new system.

The figure in cover page was created by Michael Petschauer, graphic designer, and is open/free content copyright by him ( happy_circle@yahoo.com).

Next: About Gas Dynamics Calculator Up: gasDynamics Previous: Version 0.3 Index

Created by:Genick Bar-Meir, Ph.D.
On: 2007-11-21