Nano-to-Macro Transport Processes
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this graduate-level mechanical engineering course on heat and energy transport across scales. Photons, electrons, phonons, and molecules are treated in parallel as energy carriers, covering energy levels, statistical behavior, internal energy, and transport as both waves and particles. The course works through scattering and heat generation mechanisms, the Boltzmann transport equation, and how classical heat transfer laws are derived from it, then examines where those laws break down at the nanoscale and what descriptions replace them. Applications draw from nanotechnology and microtechnology, including thermal management in small-scale devices. Materials include lecture notes and problem sets from MIT's OpenCourseWare archive, following the structure of an actual MIT graduate course, free to access with no certificate offered. The course assumes prior background in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.