This book shows how Microsoft Excel can be used as an effective educational platform for thermofluid analyses. Excel provides a rich library of mathematical and statistical functions and powerful tools for “what-if” type of analyses and data visualisation. The Solver add-in that comes with it enables the students to perform constrained and multivariable optimisation analyses of thermofluid systems. Building on these capabilities, the Excel-based platform for thermofluid analyses presented in this book also utilises the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language that comes with Microsoft Office. The book shows how VBA can be used for developing additional user-defined functions (UDFs) for supplementing Excel’s built-in functions and introduces an Excel add-in, called Thermax, that provides UDFs for determining the thermo-physical properties of the fluids commonly used in thermofluid systems.
