Turns Is Author Of New Combustion Text

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University Park, Pa. -- A mechanical engineering text book written by Dr. Stephen R. Turns, Penn State professor of mechanical engineering, is the first comprehensive introductory textbook on combustion targeted to senior undergraduate and first year graduate level students. It also has a special Penn State twist. In the preface of "An Introduction to Combustion: Concepts and Applications," Turns uses the first letter of exactly 13 paragraphs to spell out "Hail to the Lion".

Published as part of the McGraw Hill Series in Mechanical Engineering, the text is the first to present the essential theory and background material that is helpful for understanding the more complex literature on combustion. The book has already been adopted by eight schools, including the University of California at Berkeley, Rensselaer, and Drexel in a special prepublication paperback.

Turns focuses on desirable combustion, with examples and applications that relate primarily to propulsion and stationary combustion devices, but also discusses combustion generated pollutants and control. Turns emphasizes practical application throughout, with a step by step development of complexity and the use of simple mathematical models to illustrate the most basic combustion phenomena.

A distinctive feature of the text is its flexibility, which he notes is designed to "make it easy for an instructor to tailor a course to a particular theme or set of topics, while allowing the theme to evolve or change from one course offering to another." Using varying combinations of chapters, instructors can use the book to develop courses ranging from an introductory overview of combustion to vaporization theory to the treatment of combustion generated pollutants.

For example, chapters 1 7 cover the foundational topics of thermodynamics, mass transfer, and chemistry while following chapters introduce specialized topics and practical applications and examples.

Turns designed the book to provide "a successful bridge between the basic undergraduate thermal sciences and advanced treatments of combustion." Examples that relate theory to practical applications and real world problems make the book useful to practicing engineers as well as upper level students.

The book also features review questions and problems within each chapter, software that calculates thermodynamic properties of equilibrium combustion products, and codes that calculate constant pressure and constant volume adiabatic flame temperatures.

Turns earned his bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering at Penn State, returning here to teach in 1979. He received master's and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Wayne State University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, respectively.

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EDITORS: Dr. Stephen R. Turns may be reached at (814) 863 1989 or srt@psu.edu
Contacts:
Lani Bloomer
(814) 863-2132
kcbdo@engr.psu.edu

Vicki Fong
(814) 865-9481 (office)
(814) 238-1221 (home)
vyf1@psu.edu