The study of incompressible ?ows is vital to many areas of science and te- nology. This includes most of the ?uid dynamics that one ?nds in everyday life from the ?ow of air in a room to most weather phenomena. Inundertakingthesimulationofincompressible?uid?ows,oneoftentakes many issues for granted. As these ?ows become more realistic, the problems encountered become more vexing from a computational point-of-view. These range from the benign to the profound. At once, one must contend with the basic character of incompressible ?ows where sound waves have been analytically removed from the ?ow. As a consequence vortical ?ows have been analytically “preconditioned,” but the ?ow has a certain non-physical character (sound waves of in?nite velocity). At low speeds the ?ow will be deterministic and ordered, i.e., laminar. Laminar ?ows are governed by a balance between the inertial and viscous forces in the ?ow that provides the stability. Flows are often characterized by a dimensionless number known as the Reynolds number, which is the ratio of inertial to viscous forces in a ?ow. Laminar ?ows correspond to smaller Reynolds numbers. Even though laminar ?ows are organized in an orderly manner, the ?ows may exhibit instabilities and bifurcation phenomena which may eventually lead to transition and turbulence. Numerical modelling of suchphenomenarequireshighaccuracyandmostimportantlytogaingreater insight into the relationship of the numerical methods with the ?ow physics.
Dimitris Drikakis is Professor and Head of Fluid Mechanics and Computational Science Group at Cranfield University, United Kingdom. His research interests include computational methods, modeling of turbulent flows, unsteady aerodynamics, flow instabilities, shock waves and gas dynamics, biological flows, computational nanotechnology and nanoscience, and high performance computing.
William Rider is project and team leader in the Continuum Dynamics Group in the Computer and Computational Sciences Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), U.S.A. His principal interest is computational physics with an emphasis on fluid dynamics, radiation transport, turbulent mixing, shock physics, code verification, code validation and models for turbulence.
This book covers the basic techniques for simulating incompressible and low-speed flows with high fidelity in conjunction with high-resolution methods. This includes techniques for steady and unsteady flows with high-order time integration and multigrid methods, as well as specific issues associated with interfacial and turbulent flows. The book is addressed to a broad readership, including engineers and scientists concerned with the development or application of computational methods for fluid flow problems in: Mechanical, Aerospace, Civil and Chemical Engineering, Biological Flows, Atmospheric and Oceanographic Applications as well as other Environmental disciplines. It can be used for teaching postgraduate courses on Computational Fluid Dynamics and Numerical Methods in Engineering and Applied Mathematics, and can also be used as a complementary textbook in undergraduate CFD courses.
