BEE 5500

Heat and Mass Transfer in Biological Engineering

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

Focuses on understanding the principles of heat and mass transfer in the context of biological (biomedical/bioprocessing/bioenvironmental) systems. Emphasizes physical understanding of transport processes with application examples from plant, animal and human biology, the bioenvironment (soil/water/air), and industrial processing of food and biomaterials. Students in BEE 5500 will develop a more complex computational model (for which analytical solution is difficult) using the software used in one of the homework. The goal of this activity will not be computation itself but using numerical computation to probe deeper into one or more aspects of conduction/diffusion, flow, generation/depletion, or geometry effect in a transport process.

Prerequisites Prerequisite or corequisite: MATH 2930 and BEE 3310 or equivalent.

Last 4 Terms Offered 2025FA, 2024FA, 2023FA, 2022FA

Learning Outcomes

• Develop problem formulation and solution ability following a step-by-step approach, applying to heat and mass transfer in biological systems
• Describe the various modes of heat and mass transfer: conduction, convection, radiation, mass diffusion, dispersion and mass convection
• Apply mass and energy conservation to develop governing equations for heat and mass transfer
• Formulate appropriate types and number of boundary conditions to solve the governing equations for a particular situation
• Identify the ranges of biomaterial properties affecting the heat and mass transfer processes
• Build conceptual knowledge of temperatures/concentrations and heat/mass fluxes in biological systems and calculate the same: I. Under steady and unsteady conduction and diffusion II. In conduction and diffusion in presence of flow III. In radiative and combined radiative-convective situations IV. In systems undergoing phase change (freezing and thawing).

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