README DRAFT v20240917

Usage

доверяй, но проверяй (TRUST, BUT VERIFY)!

TL;DR Don't print these for your exams and hope for the best.

I have spent hundreds of hours auditing these equation sheets as a graduate student, but it is likely there are some mistakes, typos, omissions, misunderstandings, and so on. I correct errors as I find them. Ultimately, these should be thought of as personal notes and not authoritative compendia.

The goals of these equation sheets are to:

1. Share the work I did and information I compiled in hopes of helping others
2. Provide an overview of things to know
3. Act as a cross-reference to check your work
4. Inspire others to create their own sheets which work best with their methods

They are not intended to be fully self-explanatory; use of textbooks and course materials will provide context and demonstrate usage. Neither are they meant to be complete or comprehensive for any subject; they are based on what was presented in class.

The textbooks from which material is derived are included in the References sections. In general, the equations follow the order in which they appeared in classes and in the textbooks. For material from academic journals, the DOIs are listed. Some equations are taken from Wikipedia, LibreTexts.org, and other online sources. In general, they can be found by searching for the descriptions of the variables involved or for the subject. Some materials from lecture notes or my notebooks do not have primary sources; in these situations, I have performed dimensional analysis as well as omitted equations which lacked supporting examples. I can provide page numbers or equation numbers for textbook material and URLs of online sources upon request.

Other Materials

I have provided some handwritten notes which I think are valuable as examples and visual references. I have also included or linked useful material and online tools that I utilized.

Special Notes on Graduate Courses

In particular, ECH 252 and ECH 259 are often my best guesses as it seems every source I references had considerably different formulations and notations from the others, and I lack the expertise and time to rectify this.

Development

The content of this site is based on my undergraduate education at Michigan Technological University and my graduate education at University of California - Davis.

During my sophomore year, the inconsistencies between and within classes necessitated the development of chemical engineering equation sheets, the design of which was inspired by those of the MTU Physics Learning Center. Another motivating factor was that we were allowed to make our own and use them on exams.

My intensely interdisciplinary studies required that notation work across chemical, electrical, mechanical, and materials engineering. This resulted in much refactoring, which I think was mostly improvements. Notably, my mass transfer variables deviate from those of Bird, Stewart, and Lightfoot, as I thought the choices of BSL to be arbitrary and confusing. BSL versions of my equation sheets exist and can be provided upon request; I might upload them here eventually.

Formatting Guidelines

• There is an exception to every guideline
• Equation sheet should fit on a single sheet of paper
  • Margins are set for printing and 3 hole punches
• Super- and subscripts
  • Subscripts which refer to variables, quantities, or mathematical objects are formatted in italic
  • Subscripts which refer to descriptive words are formatted in roman
    • Whether or not they are capitalised is arbitrary but consistent; lowercase is the default
    • Those which stand for proper nouns are formatted in roman and capitalised
  • Nested super- and subscripts are avoided
• Units should be thought of as nested by variable (i.e. (x per y) per z)
• Vectors have a single arrow above; even in 1D space, the arrow remains
• Matrices and tensors are in boldface
• Variables with different typefaces are distinct
• Variant Greek letters are distinct from their normal forms
• Sorting in the Nomenclature Guide
  • Nomenclature for a given symbol is sorted by the variable's description, not its subscript, diacritics, etc.
  • Variables are sorted alphabetically, then by case of the first letter, then number of characters, then alphabetically
• Acronyms and initialisms are used sparingly
• Some terms are general enough that they are combined in one definition and separated by slashes
• Summation, multiplication, and integral operator indices and bounds can be above or adjacent depending on context and space and are optional
• Nomenclature Guide
  • A superscript referring to certain topics is added to descriptions of variables which are particularly obscure, exotic, or specific
  • The "is defined as" symbol (≡) is used when a symbol is just a wrapper for other symbols, when the defined quantity can only be calculated as shown, and for non-physical engineering concepts.
• Probably the most annoying thing I did was use roman type to denote complex power variables (P, Q, S).

Support

If you find an error, please investigate it and let me know why you think it is incorrect, keeping in mind TMTOWTDI: There's More Than One Way To Do It. Please provide any relevant sources.

I'm not so open to suggestions for non-errata changes, but if you think you have a strong case, I'll at least consider it.

Future

Note that I probably don't have time to explain how I formatted things in LaTeX. I'd like to learn more aspects of electrical and mechanical engineering, and if I do so, I will build equation sheets and upload them. Do note that notation can sometimes change, but at this time, I think changes will be minimal.

Code Availability

I don't want to maintain a public repository of LaTeX code, but can provide it upon request.