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Mostly pictures, black and white, but it shows how fluid and air flows in the real world. A great help for explaining various fluid dynamic phenomena to anyone.
This is a great book for all instructors teaching fluid mechanics or CFD. My students were really excited on seeing those beautiful pictures. This book can be an excellent incentive for the CFD students to simulate those flows.
I bought this book about twenty years ago, and getting hold of it then was a nightmare. I cannot remember how many times I have had recourse to this to understand a facet of a particular flow or explain it to someone else. Peter Bradshaw (then at Imperial, before he moved to Stanford) had it at the top of his recommended reading list, and none of us realised that Milton van Dyke was printing it himself from his garage. Peter was absolutely right though. This is even more important in these days, as fewer and fewer students are being exposed to experimental flow visualisation techniques. If you can get this book here do it, you won't regret it.
It sits on my bookshelf next to "Abstraction in Art and Nature" by Nathan Cabot Hale. I have reccommended this book to many animators who create visual effects, and all the artists go nuts when they look at the images that fill every page of this beautiful book. This book is one of my inspirations and treasures, and I dread the day it goes out of print. I bring this book to the design classes to open the minds of the artists to the wonder inside these pages. Yes, I love this book.
The author has researched the subject of flow visualization, and has acquired illustrations from a wide variety of sources. Having once failed a student on a doctoral oral exam because he could not define flow around a basic structural shape, I required students in a hydrodynamics course to obtain this book after it became available. Sometimes called "the picture book," it is an excellent reference illustrating all types of flow including creeping flow, laminar flow, separation, vortices, instability, turbulence, free-surface flow, natural convection, subsonic flow, shock waves, and supersonic flow. I was pleased to see that the book is still in print as it is a very valuable reference. The author has maintained a relatively low price to make it affordable to students.
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