This review concerns a niche of mechanical engineering that involves heat transfer at very small scales. Understanding this phenomenon, which is considerably different from typical heat transfer and thermodynamics experienced in the everyday world, is critical to the advancement of nanotechnological machines and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Microscale heat transfer is very important in fuel cells, electronics cooling, and many manufacturing processes. These papers are the beginning of a more solid foundation of that science that will finally allow designers to reliably predict and utilize these properties. That foundation will lead to many new advances in miniaturization of machines and electronics.
The papers in this text provided a wealth of references for my design project involving microscale convective heat transfer in liquids. The presentation of research and summaries of the overall work in this specialized field provided several new directions for further investigation and yielded several useful correlations in their own right. [ad name="Adsense Small Horz Banner"] The formatting of the book leaves something to be desired as the various chapters by different authors seem to use their own templates and little is standardized making the changes between papers a little disorienting. It does detract from the sense of quality about the book, but the contributing researchers are at the top of their field.
This book is not a textbook, so if you are not aware of the basics of microscale fluid mechanics and heat transfer, you may want to read an introductory text or two prior to using this volume to come up to speed with current knowledge in the field. That said, I found several useful papers regarding phenomena I needed to account for in my microfludic device design.