Dr. McDonald performs teaching assignment in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. In some cases, the content of the courses relates directly to the research thrust areas of the Advanced Heat Transfer and Surface Technologies Laboratory. These courses are used to build the foundational concepts that are applied in our research and development work.

 

Fluid Mechanics I (MEC E 331)
This is a first course in fluid mechanics with coverage of external flow, boundary layers, momentum theories, similitude, fluid metering, fluid friction, fluid friction in pipes, and pipe networks.

Thermo-Fluids System Design (MEC E 463)

This is a senior undergraduate design course in the area of thermo-fluid sciences. Some topical design areas include heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning, duct and piping system design, and heat exchanger analysis and design. There are also computer-aided design projects.

Building Systems Design (MEC E 466)
As an elective course, this course focuses on the design and analysis of building systems for maintaining the indoor environment. Also considered are the design of heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems through load calculations, equipment selection, and specification.

Heat Conduction (MEC E 671)
This is a graduate course that focuses exclusively on fundamental heat conduction. Some topics that are covered include the formulation of the basic governing equations in rectangular, cylindrical and spherical coordinates, consideration of linear and nonlinear problems, conduction with energy generation, transpiration cooling, conduction in non-stationary systems, phase transformation, and heat transfer in living tissue. Exact analytic solutions and the application of the integral method and perturbation solutions are also explored.

Heat Convection (MEC E 673)
This is a graduate course that focuses exclusively on fundamental heat convection. Some topics that are covered include derivation of the conservation equations for mass, momentum and energy, laminar and turbulent convection boundary layers, free and forced convection, convection with phase change, heat convection in porous media, and exploration of approximate solutions.