Computational methods for fluid dynamics

Computational fluid dynamics, commonly known by the acronym 'CFD', continues to have significant expansion.There are many software packages available that solve fluid flow problems; thousands of engineers are using them across a broad range of industries and research areas.The market is growing apparently at a rate of around 15% each year.CFD codes are accepted nowadays as design tools in many industries and are used not only to solve problems but also to help in designing and optimizing various products and as a vehicle for research.While the user-friendliness of commercial CFD-tools has greatly increased since the first edition of this book appeared in 1996, for their efficient and reliable application it is still necessary that the user has a solid background in both fluid mechanics and CFD-methods.We assume that our readers are familiar with theoretical fluid mechanics, so we try to provide useful information on the other componentcomputational methods for fluid dynamics.The book is based on material offered by the authors in the past in courses at Stanford University, the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, as well as in a number of short courses.It reflects the authors' experience in developing numerical methods, writing CFD codes and using them to solve engineering and geophysical problems.Many of the codes used in the examples, from the simple ones involving rectangular grids to the ones using non-orthogonal grids and multigrid methods, are available to interested readers; the information on how to access them via the Internet is given in the appendix.These codes illustrate some of the methods described in the book; they can be extended and adapted to the solution of many fluid mechanical problems.Students should try to modify them (e.g., to implement different boundary conditions, interpolation schemes, differentiation and integration approximations, etc.).This is important as one does not really know a method until she or he has programmed and/or run it.We have learned that many researchers have used these codes in the past as the basis for their research projects.The finite volume method is favored in this book, although finite difference methods are described in what we hope is sufficient detail.Finite element methods are not covered in detail as a number of books on that subject already exist.