CFD Activity

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is concerned with numerical solution of differential equations governing transport of mass, momentum, and energy in moving fluids. CFD activity emerged and gained prominence with availability of computers in the early 1960s. Today, CFD finds extensive usage in basic and applied research, in design of engineering equipment, and in calculation of environmental and geophysical phenomena. Since the early 1970s, commercial software packages (or computer codes) became available, making CFD an important component of engineering practise in industrial, defence, and environmental organizations.

For a long time, design (as it relates to sizing, economic operation, and safety) of engineering equipment such as heat exchangers. furnaces, cooling towers, internal combustion engines, gas turbine engines, hydraulic pumps and turbines, aircraft bodies, sea-going vessels, and rockets depended on painstakingly generated empirical information. The same was the case with numerous industrial processes such as casting, welding, alloying, mixing, drying, air-conditioning, spraying, environmental discharging of pollutants, and so on. The empirical information is typically displayed in the form of correlations or tables and nomograms among the main influencing variables. Such information is extensively availed by designers and consultants from handbooks.

The main difficulty with empirical information is that it is applicable only to the limited range of scales of fluid velocity, temperature, time, or length for which it is generated.