My name is Kevin Shumaker and i am a high school student in tucson, AZ (catalina foothills high school). I read a small article on CFD and thought it was pretty cool, however a lot of the text was over my head. My science teacher has connections at the University of Arizona where they have some machinary. I'm looking for pretty much anything especially an idea for a topic question and a fairly simple explaination of CFD. Please email me if you are remotely interested or have any info that seems useful at KMSHUMAKER@aol.com. Thanks

Kevin,

Try clicking on

http://www.cham.co.uk/website/new/cfdintro.htm

which relates to CHAM's PHOENICS website rather than to CFD generally. However,the beginning of the lecture shown in this link might provide the guidance you need.

We now have a Schools version of PHOENICS for a particular project relating to F1 in Schools. If you're interested, let me know.

Peter

You can find some nice references to introductions to CFD on this very site (http://www.cfd-online.com/Resources/misc.html#intros).

This one, for example, by NASA is a very good intro to CFD:

http://ltp.larc.nasa.gov/aero/cfdzone.htm

Another good introduction to boundary layer theory can be found here:

http://cvu.strath.ac.uk/courseware/c...dex/nindx.html

CFD is the art and science of solving the governing equations of fluid mechanics on a computer (i.e., numerically). The governing fluid mechanics equations are based on basic physical laws, such as conservation of mass, conservation of momentum (Newton's second law), conservation of energy and some kind of equation of state (for gas, it would then be for example, the idea gas law). For more complicated flows, additional equations are needed to account for other effects, but for the most part, the aforementioned laws are sufficient for most applications in aerodynamics.

The manner in which CFD solves the equations of motion, like all numerical techniques dealing with differential equations, is to approximate the set of governing equations by algebraic expressions so that they can be programmed on a computer. Thus, CFD solves the fluid mechanics equations approximately, not exactly. Differential equations are the mathematical formulations which express the rate of change of various fluid properties in space and time. for CFD to work, one also needs to construct a "grid" or "mesh", which works with the algebraic form of the fluid mechanics equations to specify where and when the solution is being generated.

If you want to go a bit more in depth, C.T.Shaw has his book in text format on line, it covers most aspects of cfd and is, of course, a lot cheaper than buying a book, even if you dont want to go too in depth even the first couple of chapters should do you right. Heres the address :- http://www.eng.warwick.ac.uk/staff/cts/cfdbook/ good luck!