Hi! I was wondering if someone might be willing to discuss with me the basics of CFD. I am in a freshmen discovery course in aero engineering and I am writing articles on several of the major fronts in aeronautical engineering. CFD is seems to be big stuff right now for engineers, so I was hoping that someone might be willing to share with me an overview of the field, their experience with it, the implications of it's use as well as some of it's theoretical roots (equations and whatnot behind the whole system). I would totally appreciate any feedback that is available and I understand that time is of the essence and lengthy responses may not be forthcoming, therefore I would appreciate any possible references to good sources or sites on the subject matter or anything else that is convenient.

Thanks! Becky

I can recommend a texbook by John D. Anderson, Jr. called Computational Fluid Dynamics; The basics with applications.

I learned a lot from this book.

G. Berntsen

becky the book that mr. berntsen referred you to is pretty good. i think for you that the first 2 or 3 chapters will be good enough. also you can try the following page which might have some links you can use. http://www.princeton.edu/~gasdyn/Flu...nks/teach.html

(1). It is a good idea to surf the Internet sites of universities, government laboratories, and companies working in the CFD field. (2). This is the best way to get started. In this way, you will see what has been done. The CFD-online resources section has many sites listed. (3). As for the technical part, all you need to know is: It requires the geometry modelling (CAD related) to describe the objects, the computational mesh (structured or unstructured cells) to cover the flow field (internal flow or external flow), turbulence modelling to simulate the high Reynolds number real world flows (laminar or turbulent), numerical algorithms to solve the discretized equations. (4). Don't worry too much about the technical part of CFD, and try to see how different flow problems and designs are being solved by CFD.

Try to read the book "Frontiers of Computational Fluid dynamics 1998", edited by D.A.Caughey, M.M.Hafez, World Scientific. It discusses virtually all kinds of CFD methods currently used for aerodynamics.

Becky, look at this address http://tfd.chalmers.se/~lada/allpaper.html http://fire8.vug.uni-duisburg.de/~oliver/scitools98/ You can find some papers to download.