Preparing mechanical engineering design students for computational fluid dynamics code development

CFD is now a useful tool for mechanical design engineers. CFD has also gained a broad acceptance in engineering education, and has been adopted at undergraduate and postgraduate level course in many universities. The teaching of CFD at the undergraduate level however usually focuses on giving students an understanding of the numerical methods and details involved, supported by what are little more than code fragments, followed by learning an abstract form of CFD skills and processes, without any real interaction with the complex core computer coding behind what is often just “easy-to-use” or “push button” commercial interfaces. Quite often, as the student progresses in his/her use of CFD, especially in the research area, it becomes clear that an “off-the-shelf” commercial CFD package is not able to satisfy all requirements to simulate a given problem fully, nor to obtain accurate results. Code development has to be undertaken to enhance the commercial code’s capabilities with the insertion of say additional FORTRAN coding or through MATLAB. The purpose of this paper is to outline what must be taught to add computer coding to what usually is a well protected, though capable of being compiled and linked, core computer code so that the complexity of interacting is lessened and better understood.