There should be a special law against publishers elaborating the scope of a book beyond that of the author's preface. Morris Davies describes his audience as ‘building scientists and services engineers’ (with which I have no argument). By the time we reach the back cover this has expanded as far as civil, building and software engineers, architects and students. What architects are supposed to make of converting heat flows to an electrical analogue circuit is hard to imagine. So having admonished the publicity department I return to the review but within the author's terms.
Morris Davies’ interest in heat flow began with the St George's School in Wallesley in the late 1950s, and this is indeed the first figure in the book. This building presented a challenge to orthodoxy because it had no fossil-fuel heating, simply requiring its lights to be left on overnight. At that time the only computational approaches available to understand the process were algebraic or electrical analogue computers. A particularly thorny problem was to determine the inside surface temperature of an external wall, taking into account the differing air and wall temperatures that surrounded it. Deriving a workable approximation proved quite a challenge that involved workers such as Danter at BRS and Billington at BSRIA. The result was the ‘admittance method’. Much of the literature is now archived in libraries and, in an age of electronic journals, relatively inaccessible to the scholar. Davies provides a useful review, drawing on much of his own contribution. The book is uncompromisingly his world view.
Most first-year students today would be more comfortable with algebra and differential equations than visualising a room as an electrical network. All the key models are described comprehensibly with reasonable balance, though transatlantic readers might have expected a little more time devoted to the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers methods. The engineering reader will want to read carefully the section on a single index temperature for an enclosure, where Davies has been a trenchant critic for many years of the so-called ‘environment temperature’ approximation. The scope of the book is strictly the heat conductance of insulating slabs. Discussion of ventilation appears only as a generalised heat loss or a surface coefficient. This is a pity as in modern construction to today's demanding standards, ventilation heat loss can be the dominant problem and differences in wall surface radiant temperatures a second-order problem. The omission detracts somewhat from the book's usefulness.
Suggesting adding material to a book already 470 pages long may seem impudent, but there is a good deal of material in the appendices to each chapter (such as a summary of complex number theory and Maxwell's theory of gases) that a student could more economically have extracted from the internet. Quite what a discussion of the historicity of Leviticus 14 on mould growth (all without references) is doing in a book on heat transfer I could not guess. Arid climate problems with fungal attack of stored grain seems far away from the issue of moisture creation in a maritime climate in the age of the fat fryer!
In a world of computing power and computer aided design (CAD) does any of this matter anymore? Curiously enough it might matter even more. Everyone is convinced that we need tools for the scoping stage of a project if sustainable development issues are to be incorporated in a project. When all you know is that you want to build a school, the CAD's data requirements can seem very premature. While this book is not specifically designed to fill this gap, those creating tools for sustainable development analysis may spare themselves reinventing the wheel by visiting the book's well-laid-out arguments.
