Engineering Science

Chapter 17 Introduction to heat transfer

17.1 Introduction

In the study of thermal science, heat transfer is considered to be a separate subject in its own right along with thermodynamics and fluid mechanics. In this chapter, therefore, we cannot hope to cover heat transfer in any depth. Rather, the aim of this chapter is to provide an introductory foundation to the subject. The in-depth study of heat transfer requires the use of some relatively sophisticated mathematics, involving partial differential equations that are considered beyond this introductory text. Therefore, for this reason and in the interests of space, we will be restricting our study to one-dimensional heat transfer. We start by considering heat transfer by conduction through ...