Yunus A. Çengel is Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from North Carolina State University. His research areas are renewable energy, desalination, exergy analysis, heat transfer enhancement, radiation heat transfer, and energy conservation. He served as the director of the Industrial Assessment Center (IAC) at the University of Nevada, Reno, from 1996 to 2000. He has led teams of engineering students to numerous manufacturing facilities in Northern Nevada and California to industrial assessments, and has prepared energy conservation, waste minimization, and productivity enhancement reports for them.

Dr. Çengel is the author or coauthor of the widely adopted textbooks Thermodynamics: An Engineering Approach, 6th edition (2008), Heat and Mass Transfer: A Practical Approach, 3rd edition (2007), Introduction to Thermodynamics and Heat Transfer, 2nd edition (2008), Fluid Mechanics: Fundamentals and Applications (2006), Essentials of Fluids Mechanics: Fundamentals and Applications (2008), all published by McGraw-Hill. Some of his textbooks have been translated to Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Turkish, Italian, Greek, Tai, and French.

Dr. Çengel is the recipient of several outstanding teacher awards, and he has received the ASEE Meriam/Wiley Distinguished Author Award for excellence in authorship in 1992 and again in 2000. Dr. Çengel is a registered Professional Engineer in the State of Nevada, and is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE).

Robert H. Turner is Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR). He earned a B.S. and M.S. from the University of California at Berkeley, and his Ph.D. from UCLA, all in mechanical engineering. He worked in industry for 18 years, including nine years at Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Dr. Turner then joined the University of Nevada in 1983. His research interests include solar and renewable energy applications, thermal sciences, and energy conservation. He established and was the first director of the Industrial Assessment Center at the University of Nevada.

For 20 years Dr. Turner has designed the solar components of many houses. In 1994–95, in a cooperative effort between UNR and Erciyes University in Kayseri, Turkey, he designed and oversaw construction of the fully instrumented Solar Research Laboratory at Erciyes University, featuring 130 square meters of site-integrated solar collectors. His interest in applications has led Dr. Turner to maintain an active consulting practice.

Dr. Turner is a registered Professional Engineer and is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE).

John M. Cimbala is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park. He received his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Penn State and his M.S. in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology (CalTech). He received his Ph.D. in Aeronautics from CalTech in 1984 under the supervision of Professor Anatol Roshko, to whom he will be forever grateful. His research areas include experimental and computational fluid mechanics and heat transfer, turbulence, turbulence modeling, turbomachinery, indoor air quality, and air pollution control. During the academic year 1993–94, Professor Cimbala took a sabbatical leave from the University and worked at NASA Langley Research Center, where he advanced his knowledge of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and turbulence modeling.

Dr. Cimbala is the co-author of three other textbooks: Fluid Mechanics: Fundamentals and Applications (2006), Essentials of Fluid Mechanics: Fundamentals and Applications (2008), both published by McGraw-Hill, and Indoor Air Quality Engineering: Environmental Health and Control of Indoor Pollutants (2003), published by Marcel-Dekker, Inc. He has also contributed to parts of other books and is the author or co-author of dozens of journal and conference papers. More information can be found at www.mne.psu.edu/cimbala.

Professor Cimbala is the recipient of several outstanding teaching awards and views his book writing as an extension of his love of teaching. He is a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), and the American Physical Society (APS).