Transport phenomena is the term popularized, if not coined, by Bird, Stewart, and Lightfoot (1960) to describe momentum, energy, and mass transfer. This book is based upon roughly thirty-five years of teaching first-year graduate students, first at Northwestern University and later at Texas A&M University. It draws upon Momentum, Energy, and Mass Transfer in Continua (Slattery 1981), the first edition of which was written at an early stage of my career, as well as Interfacial Transport Phenomena (Slattery 1990), which is intended for a much more specialized audience.

As you examine the table of contents, you will observe that, superimposed upon the three major themes of momentum, energy, and mass transfer, there are three minor themes. I begin each of these blocks of material with a discussion of the theory that we are to use: Chapters 1, 2, 5, and 8. This is followed by illustrations of the various ways in which the theory can be used to obtain fairly complete solutions: Chapters 3, 6, and 9. Finally, I conclude by examining the four most common types of averaging that are used to obtain approximate solutions: Chapters 4, 7, and 10.

This book is intended both as a textbook for first-year graduate students and as a self-study text for students and researchers interested in the field. The book is relatively long, in order to accommodate a variety of course syllabi as well as a range of self-study interests. In spite of its length, you easily will find topics that I have left out.