Page 18 - Introduction to Computational Fluid Dynamics

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Preface 0 521 85326 5 May 27, 2005 0:54

During the last three decades, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has emerged as
an important element in professional engineering practice, cutting across several
branches of engineering disciplines. This may be viewed as a logical outcome
of the recognition in the 1950s that undergraduate curricula in engineering must
increasingly be based on engineering science. Thus, in mechanical engineering
curricula, for example, the subjects of fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, and heat
transfer assumed prominence.
I began my teaching career in the early 1970s, having just completed a Ph.D. de-
gree that involved solution of partial differential equations governing fluid motion
and energy transfer in a particular situation (an activity not called CFD back then!).
After a few years of teaching undergraduate courses on heat transfer and postgrad-
uate courses on convective heat and mass transfer, I increasingly shared the feeling
with the students that, although the excellent textbooks in these subjects empha-
sised application of fundamental laws of motion and energy, the problem-solving
part required largely varied mathematical tricks that changed from one situation to
another. I felt that teachers and students needed a chance to study relatively more
real situations and an opportunity to concentrate on the physics of the subject. In
my reckoning, the subject of CFD embodies precisely this scope and more.
The introduction of a five-year dual degree (B.Tech. and M.Tech.) program at IIT
Bombay in 1996 provided an opportunity to bring new elements into the curriculum.
I took this opportunity to introduce a course on computational fluid dynamics and
heat transfer (CFDHT) in our department as a compulsory course in the fourth
year for students of the thermal and fluids engineering stream. The course, with an
associated CFDHT laboratory, has emphasised relearning fluid mechanics and heat
and mass transfer through obtaining numerical solutions. This, of course, contrasts
with the analytical solutions learnt in earlier years of the program. Through teaching
of this CFDHT course, I discovered that this relearning required attitudinal change
on the part of the student. Thus, for example, the idea that all 1D conduction
problems (steady or unsteady, in Cartesian, cylindrical, or spherical coordinates,
with constant or variable properties, with or without area change, with or without

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