Knovel engineering

Anyone studying the physical sciences or engineering would benefit from making friends with Knovel. I’ve plumbed the depths of Knovel before now – click this link for the blog post where I explain what Knovel does and why you should love and use it. Having chatted with the lovely lady from Elsevier who teaches people like your Faculty Librarians and lecturers about the latest developments in our academic information resources, I just wanted to pass on news of the latest exciting new tools and features that have been added. Today, I want to introduce you to one of their most exciting new tools, the steam calculator.

Enter the dragon steam calculators

Steam is useful for so many things but as any engineer will tell you, not all steam is the same. The gentle frothy mist spilling over from a pan of water on the stove will not drive a power generator turbine and power the national grid, nor will it sterilise surgical instruments. The physical properties of water and steam under different conditions are actually quite complex, and so Knovel has developed a series of calculators to make it much easier to determine how water and steam will behave and what they will do under specified conditions, as the following video explains.

Click here to experiment with the steam calculators yourself.