Computational Fluid Dynamics

CFD is a letterword for Computational Fluid Dynamics. The term 'CFD' is used for a specific technology that models gas and liquid flows on computers. It's final goal depends on the situation, but more often than not it is one of the following:

• Insight: to provide a complete insight in flows of gasses and/or liquids to be able to answer specific engineering questions.
• Virtual Prototyping: to test virtually with a computermodel a possible improvement of a device, before going along the route of prototyping and physical testing.
• Speed of development: to develp new designs faster and to make them ready for market faster.
• "What if"-questions: Using modeling, you can answer what-if questions that would have remained unanswered otherwise.

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• Preprocessing: the geometry of the flow domain is brought into the computer and a computational mesh is designed/constructed
• Solving: the flow with its physical phenomena is being calculated.
• Postprocessing: the results of the simulation are being processed into clear pictures, contourplots, numerical values, .... These results are analysed with the critical eyes of an engineer.

• Velocity vectors
• Stream lines
• Pathlines
• Contour plots on arbitrary cut planes of any flow variable (velocity components, temperature, turbulence, shear stresses, vorticity, ...)
• Animated solution to render the time dependancy of the solution