How Does Your Fluid Flow?

This article reviews the method of analyzing fluid flow in structures and designs, which is enjoying a burst of interest. Twenty years later, manufacturers across a myriad of industries are licensing the technology from a pool of vendors who now market computational fluid dynamics (CFD) packages of many stripes. Engineers use CFD to predict how fluids will flow and to predict the quantitative effects of the fluid on the solids with which they are in contact. Airflow is commonly studied with the software. Many mechanical engineers do not need access to all the bells and whistles an advanced CFD program can provide. Advanced analysis programs are usually the purview of a user trained on a particular CFD package. Engineers used CFD to determine how to best position the fans so that air flowed inside the refrigerator and the freezer in the most efficient way. After studying fluid flow simulations, they made prototypes of the most promising modeled designs to see if the prototypes matched CFD simulation results.