Simple Fields of Physics by Finite Element Analysis [Paperback]

Prof. Backstrom supplies 132 useful applications of the free Student Version of the excellent finite element analysis program FlexPDE. He covers the following topics: liquid, rotating as a disk; earth and moon as point masses, or planets of finite size, in a gravitational field; two positive point charges or a positive and negative point charge ; electric dipoles ; field around charged wires ; dipole of charged wires ; metal rod in a metal box; metal bar in a tube; metal rod across a parallel field; conduction in a rectangular plate or a trapezoidal plate; radial conduction in a foil; plate made of two different metals; coaxial cable; parallel plate capacitor; surface charge of polarization; magnetic field around a wire; field around two wires; permanent magnet; two hot-water tubes; uniformly heated, semi-circular rod; cooling by forced convection; conduction in anisotropic wood; temperature-dependent conductivity; steel foil emitting infrared radiation; iron bar with a temperature step; iron bard soldered to a copper bar; internally-heated steel bar with a loss; oscillating temperature in a steel block; sinusoidal volume heating of a steel foil; coin in a metal box; electrical conduction in a cone; glass block in a parallel electric field; plane wave in a conducting material; plane-wave in two different media; magnetic wave field; loss-free rectangular cavity; cavity of circular cross-section; Schrodinger wave equation; particle transmission, particle scattering, and bound particle; harmonic oscillator in one and two dimensions; flow through a constricted channel; cylindrical obstacle across a straight channel; obstacle close to wall; drag and lift on an inclined plate; viscous flow in channel at both low and high Reynolds number, constricted or not; channel with lateral cavity; uniform velocity of injection; viscous flow past a circular cylinder; drag and lift on an inclined plate; simple percolation in (x, y) space; percolation in (x, y) by Navier-Stokes PDE; and viscous flow in three dimensions. So, you can see that Prof. Backstrom covers many of the classic field problems of electricity, magnetism, heat, electromagnetic waves, and fluid dynamics.

There is very little here to complain about. Perhaps the displayed graphs should be heavier and thus be more legible. The scripts, as given, have to be typed in for each problem; however, after I requested that they be provided as text files to the FlexPDE Forum, Prof. Backstrom complied, saving all of us in industry much typing time. One other point: the program can plot field flux lines and potential lines in one orthogonal net, however, only the values of one or the other variable are tabulated, not both. I've requested that the developers fix this so that the numerical values of both flux and potential can appear on one graph, rather than on separate graphs.

Hope it's OK that I'm basing this on an earlier edition of the book...

I think you pretty much can count on being glad you bought this book, if you use FlexPDE or if you're going to try it. For one thing, the discussion complements all of the documentation available with the software, and if you are going to do something as inherently detailed as applying the finite element method, you should want to be able to read two different sources, to take advantage of both perspectives. For another thing, there are plenty of good examples to use as a starting point, to modify (or even combine) to suit your specific problems.

FlexPDE itself is an amazingly clean and versatile software package. I haven't found any other similarly useful entrance into the FEM field. This thing can get you pretty far, and it seems like the only tools that go further only do so in certain specialized niches, at much greater cost and with much greater difficulty. That there is a student version that can do a useful fraction of these kinds of things is even more amazing.

If you are not using or interested in FlexPDE, this book would at most be of passing interest. But if you are, for this kind of price, you kind of have to spring for it.

In my older edition, the print quality is nothing special, there is no color, and the graphs are not pretty the way they would be in Scientific American. I use the full blown "professional" version of FlexPDE and get beautiful color graphs at high resolution, and the book does not duplicate this, as the author notes. But I have never had a hard time reading any of the text or graphs, and a few of us have passed this (and others like Backstrom's similar book on fluid dynamics) around for years without the binding cracking or any pages falling out. It's not a coffee table book, anyway.

I would like to see FlexPDE catch on with even more people, and find several of my favorite authors writing texts on it to choose from, but until then, this is certainly a good choice.

The printing quality is very lousy. Some of the figures in this book can't even be seen properly.
The printing seem to be from poor quality photocopying machine with not enough ink.

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