In physics and engineering, mass flow rate is the mass of a substance which passes through a given surface per unit of time. Its unit is kilogram per second in SI units, and slug per second or pound per second in US customary units. The common symbol is (pronounced "m-dot"), although sometimes μ (Greek lowercase mu) is used.
Sometimes, mass flow rate is termed mass flux or mass current, see for example Fluid Mechanics, Schaum's et al. In this article, the (more intuitive) definition is used.
Read more about Mass Flow Rate: Definition, Alternative Equations, Usage, Analogous Quantities
Famous quotes containing the words mass, flow and/or rate:
“The mass never comes up to the standard of its best member, but on the contrary degrades itself to a level with the lowest.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For as the interposition of a rivulet, however small, will occasion the line of the phalanx to fluctuate, so any trifling disagreement will be the cause of seditions; but they will not so soon flow from anything else as from the disagreement between virtue and vice, and next to that between poverty and riches.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“As a novelist, I cannot occupy myself with “characters,” or at any rate central ones, who lack panache, in one or another sense, who would be incapable of a major action or a major passion, or who have not a touch of the ambiguity, the ultimate unaccountability, the enlarging mistiness of persons “in history.” History, as more austerely I now know it, is not romantic. But I am.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)