During the last three decades, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has emerged as an important element in professional engineering practice, cutting across several branches of engineering disciplines. This may be viewed as a logical outcome of the recognition in the 1950s that undergraduate curricula in engineering must increasingly be based on engineering science. Thus, in mechanical engineering curricula, for example, the subjects of fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, and heat transfer assumed prominence.

I began my teaching career in the early 1970s, having just completed a Ph.D. degree that involved solution of partial differential equations governing fluid motion and energy transfer in a particular situation (an activity not called CFD back then!). After a few years of teaching undergraduate courses on heat transfer and postgraduate courses on convective heat and mass transfer, I increasingly shared the feeling with the students that, although the excellent textbooks in these subjects emphasised application of fundamental laws of motion and energy, the problem-solving part required largely varied mathematical tricks that changed from one situation to another. I felt that teachers and students needed a chance to study relatively more real situations and an opportunity to concentrate on the physics of the subject. In my reckoning, the subject of CFD embodies precisely this scope and more.

The introduction of a five-year dual degree (B. Tech. and M. Tech.) program at IIT Bombay in 1996 provided an opportunity to bring new elements into the curriculum.