I'm just starting to do some analysis on the cylinder heads for our race engines. I'm new to CFD. Can anyone recommend a good source of information to learn about the best way to set up the models and analyze the results? Websites? Books? Your own advice?!

TIA-

My advice - forget about the cylinder head for at least a few months. Do as many tutorials as you can find, then do some really basic cases that you can get results to verify with. Then maybe have a go at your cylinder head.

I dont mean to shut you down, but if you think CFD is something you can just pick up and produce good results with you are wasting your time and money. Cylinder head flow is known to be one of the more complex simulations for CFD.

Best source of information - experience. Lots of it. As far as books, try and get the catalogs of SAE technical papers from the last few years also on CD. Many many papers, several that deal with head flow. That will give you some idea.

Good luck.

Thank you for your advice. I have been wearing the tutorials out and I've been solving some simple problems with good results. The thing is that with cylinder heads I've got measured flow data that I can correlate. I don't really have anything else to start with and work my way up to cylinder heads. I know that it is a very complicated problem. I am also aware of the fact that your output is only as good as your inputs. This I've learned over the years designing engines from 1D engine simulation. GIGO - garbage in garbage out! I'm certain that CFD is no different. Actually, you just told me to do precisely what I'm asking for - information on cases I can study that I can learn from. I was hoping someone would recommend a good internal flows book or paper that I can obtain.

Thanks again.