Chapter 1 - Introduction

Abstract

This chapter discusses the background and history of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The significance of CFD methodologies has also been discussed in the chapter. The beginning of CFD was triggered by the availability of increasingly more powerful mainframes and the advances in CFD are still tightly coupled with the evolution of the computer technology. Nowadays, the CFD methodologies are routinely employed in the fields of aircraft, turbomachinery, car, and ship design. CFD is also applied in meteorology, oceanography, astrophysics, biology, oil recovery, and architecture. Many numerical techniques developed for CFD are also used in the solution of the Maxwell equations or in aeroacoustics. Hence, CFD is becoming an increasingly important design tool in engineering and also a substantial research tool in various sciences. The CFD methods are concerned with the solution of equations of fluid motion as well as with the interaction of fluid with solid bodies. One of the challenging tasks in CFD is the generation of structured or unstructured body-fitted grids around complex geometries. The grid is used for discretising the governing equations in space. Therefore, the accuracy of the flow solution is tightly coupled with the quality of the grid.