Computational Fluid Dynamics (CDF) explained October 10, 2017

What is fluid flow?

Fluid flow is:

Breathing, drinking, digesting, washing, swimming, smoking
Laundering clothes, and hanging them out to dry
Heating or ventilating a room; extinguishing a fire with water
Burning gasoline in an automobile engine to create power and (unfortunately) pollution
Making soup, creating plastics from petroleum
Flying an airplane, parachuting, surfing, sailing, soldering, making steel, electrolysing water

What is Computational fluid dynamics?

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is the use of applied mathematics, physics and computational software to visualise how a gas or liquid flows, as well as how the gas or liquid affects objects as it flows past. Computational fluid dynamics is based on the Navier-Stokes equations. These equations describe how the velocity, pressure, temperature, and density of a moving fluid are related. In other words, it makes use of numerical methods, mathematical modeling and software tools to solve and analyze problems that involve fluid flows and uses the latest in computer hardware and elegant programming techniques to model and simulate liquid and gas interactions with surfaces, as defined by boundary conditions. This gives insight into flow patterns that would be difficult, expensive or impossible to study using traditional techniques.

CFD is predicting what will happen, quantitatively, when fluids flow, often with the complications of:

Simultaneous flow of heat
Mass transfer (eg perspiration, dissolution)
Phase change (eg melting, freezing, boiling),
Chemical reaction (eg combustion, rusting),
Mechanical movement (eg of pistons, fans, rudders), stresses in and displacement of immersed or surrounding solids.

Industries where CFD Modeling is applied:

CFD Solution/modeling is used in different industries for different analytical capabilities. Some of the prime industries where CFD simulation is frequently used are:

Aerospace / Aeronautics, Automotive or Automobile
Building HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning)
Chemical / Petrochemicals
Energy / Power Generation
Manufacturing / Process Engineering
Oil and gas industry
Product Design and Optimization
Oil and gas Industry
Turbo Machinery and etc.

Because of the depth of CFD there is high probability of getting lost in the learning joinery and in many cases getting demotivated from learning CFD itself. We recommend booking onto a CFD course to further your knowledge and understanding.

Are you interested in a computational fluid dynamics course? Find out more about our CFD training at London TFE.