Fluid mechanics is ubiquitous in our daily life, as well as within a wide breath of engineering disciplines. For instance, fluid mechanics plays a crucial role in understanding and optimising the flow of air around aircraft, in the design and optimization of vehicles, in the design and analysis of chemical reactors, mixing vessels, heat exchangers, and other process equipment, and it also underpins several key processes taking place in our body (e.g.,blood flow).

This modules provides an introduction to Fluid Mechanics, with special focusing on hydrostatics, hydrodynamics and pipe flow. Hydrostatics is essential to identify points of high pressure in a system and to also identify forces acting on submerged surfaces either planar or curved. Hydrodynamics, instead, focuses on the motion of fluids and the requirement to identify pressure drops, losses, flow rate values, and forces generated by moving fluids. Pipe flow is a special case of hydrodynamics, where the fluid is forced to flow in a closed geometry that can have different types of cross-section.