The book is primarily meant as a course book. It teaches fundamentals and explores applications. It will appeal to senior undergraduate and graduate students in mechanical engineering and to professional engineers seeking to understand the operation of turbomachines. Readers will gain a fundamental understanding of turbomachines. They will also be able to make a reasoned choice of turbomachine for a particular application and to understand its operation. Basic design of the simplest turbomachines as a centrifugal fan, an axial steam turbine or a centrifugal pump, is also possible using the topics covered in the book.
Erik Dick was born on December 10, 1950 in Torhout, Belgium. He obtained a M.Sc. in electromechanical engineering from Ghent University in 1973 and a Ph.D. in computational fluid dynamics in 1980. From 1973 he worked as researcher and became full professor of mechanical engineering at Ghent University in 1995, where he teaches turbomachines and computational fluid dynamics. His area of research is computational methods and turbulence and transition models for flow problems in mechanical engineering. He is author or co-author of about 125 papers in international scientific journals and about 250 papers at international conferences. He is the recipient of the 1990 Iwan Akerman award for fluid machinery of the Belgian National Science Foundation.