What is Computational Fluid Dynamics or CFD ?

What are Navier-Stokes Equations?

What is Computational Fluid Dynamics or CFD Discretization?
What is Computational Fluid Dynamics or CFD Grid?
What is a Computational Fluid Dynamics or CFD Solver?

What is Computational Fluid Dynamics or CFD?

Computational Fluid Dynamics constitutes a new “third approach” in the philosophical

study and development of the whole discipline of fluid dynamics. In the 17th century,
the foundations for experimental fluid dynamics were laid. The 18th and 19th centuries
saw the gradual development of theoretical fluid dynamics. As a result, throughout most
of the 20th century, the study and practice of fluid dynamics (indeed, all of physical
science and engineering) involved the use of pure theory on the one hand and pure
experiment on the other. If you were learning fluid dynamics as recently as, say, 1960,
you would have been operating in the “two-approach world” of theory and experiment.
However, the advent of the high speed digital computer combined with the development
of accurate numerical algorithms for solving physical problems on these computers has
revolutionized the way we study and practice fluid dynamics today. It has introduced a
fundamentally important new third approach in fluid dynamics – the approach of
Computational Fluid Dynamics.

Computational Fluid Dynamics or simply CFD is concerned with obtaining numerical

solutions to the fluid flow problems using computers. The advent of high-speed and
large-memory computers has enabled CFD to obtain solutions to many flow problems
including those that are compressible or incompressible, laminar or turbulent, chemically
reacting or non-reacting.

A variety of reasons can be cited for the increased importance simulation techniques
have achieved in the recent years:

Need to forecast performance

Cost and/or impossibility of experiments
The desire for increased insight
Advances in computer speed and memory (1:10 every 5 years)
Advances in solution algorithms

To understand CFD lets break down the word CFD:

 Computational - having to do with mathematics, computing
Fluid Dynamics - the dynamics of things that flow

The dynamics of fluid flow is governed by continuity (conservation of mass), the Navier-
Stokes (conservation of momentum), and the energy equations (conservation of
energy). These equations form a system of coupled non-linear partial differential
equations (PDEs). Because of the non-linear terms the in PDEs, analytical methods can
yield very few solutions. In general, closed form of the analytical solutions are possible
only if these PDEs can be made linear, either because non-linear terms naturally drop
out (e.g., fully developed flow in ducts and flows that are inviscid and irrotational
everywhere) or because non-linear terms are small compared to other terms so that
they can be neglected (e.g., creeping flows, small amplitude sloshing of liquid etc.). If
the non-linearity in the governing PDEs cannot be neglected, which is the situation for
most engineering flows, then numerical methods are needed to obtain the solutions.

CFD is an art of replacing the differential equation governing the fluid flow, with the set
of algebraic equations (the process is called discretization), which in turn can be solved
with the aid of a digital computer to get an approximate solution. The well known
discretization methods used in CFD are Finite Difference Method (FDM), Finite Volume
Method (FVM), Finite Element Method (FEM), and Boundary Element Method (BEM)

Benefits of CFD

Insight of the design

If you have a device or system design which is difficult to prototype or test through
experimentation, CFD analysis enables you to virtually crawl inside your design and see
how it performs. There are many phenomena that you can witness through CFD, which
wouldn't be visible through any other means. CFD gives you a deeper insight into your
designs

Foresight of the design

Because CFD is a tool for predicting what will happen under a given set of
circumstances, it can quickly answer many 'what if?' questions. You provide a set of
boundary conditions, and the software gives you outcomes. In a short time, you can
predict how your design will perform, and test many variations until you arrive at an
optimal result. All of this can be done before physical prototyping and testing

Efficiency

The foresight you gain from CFD helps you to design better and faster, save money,
meet environmental regulations and ensure industry compliance. CFD analysis leads to
shorter design cycles and your products get to market faster. In addition, equipment
improvements are built and installed with minimal downtime. CFD is a tool for
compressing the design and development cycle allowing for rapid prototyping

Numerical Lab or Virtual Wind Tunnel

CFD results are directly analogous to wind tunnel results obtained in a laboratory – they
both represent sets of data for given flow configurations at different Mach numbers,
Reynolds numbers, etc. However, unlike a wind tunnel, which is generally a heavy,
unwieldy device, a computer program (say in the form of CD) is something you can
carry around in your hand. Or a source program in the memory of a given computer can
be accessed remotely by people on terminals that can be thousands of miles away from
the computer itself. A computer program is, therefore, a readily transportable tool, a
“transportable wind tunnel”. Just imagine how many experiments you can do with this
wind tunnel and at what cost? A countless number of experiments with negligible cost!!!

Ability to Simulate Real Conditions

Many flow and heat transfer processes can not be (easily) tested. Imagine a hypersonic
vehicle entering into earth's atmosphere with Mach 20. Creating such a high speed flow
in a wind tunnel is very difficult or rather impossible. CFD provides the ability to
theoretically simulate any physical condition

Ability to Simulate Ideal Conditions

Can we study effect of viscosity on flow behavior? For example, what are the differences
between laminar and turbulent flow over an airfoil for Re = 100,000? If this experiment
is done in a wind tunnel, the flow will be viscous always. But CFD allows a great control
on physical process, and provides the ability to isolate specific phenomena. For the
above case, it’s just a matter of making one run of CFD with turbulence model switched
off (laminar flow) and one run of CFD with turbulence model switched on.

There are numerous advantages of such kind and that’s why CFD tool is now-a-days
playing major role in the design process of real life engineering applications.

The CFD Process

There are essentially three stages to every CFD simulation process: preprocessing,
solving and postprocessing

Preprocessing

This is the first step in building and analyzing a flow model. It includes building the
model within a computer-aided design (CAD) package, creating and applying a suitable
computational mesh, and entering the flow boundary conditions and fluid materials
properties.

There are a large number of commercial CAD packages for creating complex 3D
geometries. CATIA, SolidWorks, IDEAS, ProE are few to name. The important and time
consuming step in a CFD process is creating good quality grid around or inside the CAD
model. A large number of commercial structured and unstructured grid generation
softwares are available. GAMBIT, Tgrid, ICEM-CFD, IGG, AUTOGRID, HEXPRESS, GridZ
are a few to mention. Each software has its own positive and negative points. Most of
the grid generation softwares have geometrical capability which will allow to create
moderately complex geometry or to repair the imported geometry.
 Solution

The CFD solver does the flow calculations and produces the results by solving the
discritized form of governing equations. This stage needs a clear understanding of the
flow physics involved in the problem. There is a broad range of physical models present
in many commercial softwares like FLUENT, CFX, FINE, FlowZ, etc. All these models
have been validated against industrial scale applications, so you can accurately simulate
real-world conditions, including:

Multiphase flows
Reacting flows
Rotating equipment
Moving and deforming objects
Turbulence
Radiation
Acoustics
Dynamic meshing

As a solution to all the governing equations, solution step will calculate the flow
parameters like velocity, pressure, density, temperature etc. at each grid point.

Postprocessing

The enormous amount of data generated by CFD solver can not be analyzed by just
looking at the numerical values. The final step in CFD analysis involves the organization
and interpretation of the predicted flow data and the production of CFD images and
animations. Different post-processing tools like color plots, contour plots and vector
plots are used to go into the problem. The interpretation of these results plays an
important role in determining the performance of any device being studied.

See the presentation for “Fundamentals of CFD and its industrial applications”

What are Navier-Stokes Equations?

One of the most important ways in which a fluid differs from a rigid solid body is that its
motion is almost always associated with a drastic deformation of its own shape and size
and under some conditions, also its overall volume. The rigid body dynamics taught at
the high school level is insufficient to describe the motion of fluid. Nevertheless, the
foundation that one can turn to is the Newton’s Second Law. When the force balance is
applied on fluid elements using different approaches, one arrives at the equation that
mathematicians in Western Europe namely, Claude-Louis Marie Henri Navier and later
George Gabriel Stokes (though there were more than just these two working on the
equations) derived in the 19th century that describes the motion of fluid under the
action of any applied external field (pressure, body forces, temperature, etc.). Since a
fluid can deform in all the four coordinates of the time-space continuum, the force
balance when mathematically formulated would show-up in a partial differential equation
(PDE) unlike the ordinary differential equation (ODE) obtained for rigid body dynamics
due to the F=ma formulation. It may be noted that ODE refers to differential equations
with differentiation with respect to only one variable (e.g., t) unlike a PDE where the
differentiation of function (s) is with respect to more than one variable (e.g., x, y, z, t).

Any simulation stems from the solution of some governing principles of a phenomenon.
These governing principles have to be mathematically formulated so as to be interpreted
and solved using computational techniques. The N-S equation is in this way the
mathematical formulation of the governing principle of momentum conservation.

The Navier-Stokes equation (or the N-S equation) is a vector equation and is also called
the momentum equation. It is supplemented by the mass conservation equation, also
called continuity equation and the energy equation. In the CFD community, usually the
term “Navier-Stokes equations” is used to refer to all of these conservation principles.
These equations can be obtained in the reduced form by applying specific conditions like,
incompressible flow, Inviscid flow, Steady flow, etc. A unique solution for the variables
u, v, w, T, p, etc. to these equations requires boundary conditions and initial conditions
(only for unsteady flows). The solution would be able to describe the value of these
unknown variables at each and every point in the domain where the equations are being
solved.

Till date no solution technique has been able to obtain a complete solution of the N-S
equation. Several mathematical techniques like discretization schemes have approached
to obtain a “solvable” form of the N-S equations. CFD solves these “solvable” N-S
equations for performing flow analysis

Existence and Uniqueness

The existence and uniqueness of classical solutions of the 3-D Navier-Stokes equations
is still an open mathematical problem and is one of the Clay Institute's Millenium
Problems. In 2-D, existence and uniqueness of regular solutions for all time have been
shown by Jean Leray in 1933. He also gave the theory for the existence of weak
solutions in the 3-D case while uniqueness is still an open question.

However, recently, Prof. Penny Smith submitted a paper, Immortal Smooth Solution of
the Three Space Dimensional Navier-Stokes System, which may provide a proof of the
existence and uniqueness. (It has a serious flaw, so the author withdrew the paper).

What is Computational Fluid Dynamics or CFD Discretization?

The word discrete is opposed to the concept of continuity. While at the Quantum level,
things are explained with concepts like quantas, discrete packets, etc., in classical
physics, continuity holds in describing mathematical formulations and also their
solutions. Discretization concerns the process of transferring continuous models and
equations into discrete counterparts. This process is usually carried out as a first step
toward making them suitable for numerical evaluation and implementation on digital
computers.

Discretization can be performed on several continuous entities like, images, equations,

geometries, features, etc. In the context of CFD, discretization is performed to solve the
Navier-Stokes equations whose direct solution would otherwise be extremely difficult
and in most cases impossible. The solution process may involve the usage of digital
computers.

Discretization in any CAE analysis involves breaking-down of the given geometry where
the computation has to be performed. The result is a discrete distribution of smaller
elements which are themselves distinct computational domains where any governing
equations (N-S, vibration, species-conservation, etc.) can now be solved in an
approximate form. The approximate formulation that is derived from the continuous
equation (often PDEs) is dependent on the Discretization scheme/technique which is
chosen often based on the nature of the equations to be solved.

Some of the Discretization techniques that are commonly used in the CAE industry are
Finite Difference Method (FDM), Finite Volume Method (FVM) and Finite Element Method
(FEA).

FDM is the oldest of the three and has been used extensively for solving ODEs. FDM was
also employed in initial CFD codes but lost its importance as it was unable to capture
sharp gradients in the flow domain (PDEs being of the hyperbolic nature!).

FVM is the commonly used discretization technique in most of the commercial CFD
codes. Most of the CFD packages nowadays like ANSYS FLUENT, ANSYS CFX, Star-CD,
etc., are based on the Finite Volume formulation for discretizing the governing set of N-S
equations and solving them. It is conservative in nature and is stable for a wide range of
flow problems.

FEM is the commonly used discretization scheme in almost all of the Structural solvers
studying vibration, deformation, and thermo-stress analysis. Some CFD codes also
employ the Finite Element code but are not very popular for specific fluid flow analysis
especially due to their inability to accurately capture turbulent flows. Generally, the
multi-physics software packages are based on FEM.

What is a Computational Fluid Dynamics or CFD Grid?

A discretization scheme involves the breaking-down of the geometry into smaller parts
(elements, volumes, points, etc.). The resulting discretized geometry which is now a
group of several smaller computational regions is termed as a grid. The approximate
formulations of the governing equations obtained through the different discretization
schemes like FDM, FVM, FEM, etc., are solved on the discretized geometry or grid.

As shown in the figure, the grid itself has more entities associated with it, namely, node,
edge, face and cell. The definitions differ for two dimensional and three dimensional
grids. Grids are generated using pre-processing software packages.

Grids can be of different shapes as shown in the figure below:

Grids can also be of different types based on the strategy of creation. They are classified
as:
1. Structured – Single block
2. Structured – Multi block
3. Unstructured

CFD solutions are best obtained on structured grids than unstructured grids. The
structured grids allow the connectivity information for the entire mesh to be accessed by
three index variables: i, j and k. Due to this constraint, if structured meshes are created
using only a single-block, the meshes may include 180 degree corners (candidate for
negative element!). Multi-block structured grids on the other hand can give the accuracy
of structured grid while preventing such negative elements.

All triangle or tetrahedral elements are unstructured grids. Such elements should be
avoided at least in those regions where a huge gradient of variables (velocity, pressure,
temperature, etc.) is expected. At the walls, as much as possible, there should be at
least some layers of quadrilateral (2D) or prism/hexahedral (3D).

The solution on unstructured grids is limited to only some kinds of solvers and even if
the solver can solve on unstructured grids, the solution is often not as accurate as in the
case if a structured grid is used. Another great advantage of having structured grids is
the huge reduction in the number of grid elements as opposed to the unstructured grids.
Structured grids however, cannot be applied always over very complicated geometries.

The Finite Difference Method solves the partial differential equations at the nodes of the
grids. Therefore, FDM requires the grids to be structured (having i, j, k information
access).

The Finite Volume Method can solve the partial differential equations on structured as
well as unstructured grids since, the variables are solved for at the cell-centers,
independent of the number of edges/faces the cell has.

The Finite Element Method can also solve the governing equations on any kind of grids
as the formulation is in terms of a weak function definition at the nodes.

What is a Computational Fluid Dynamics or CFD Solver?

The CFD process involves discretization of the geometry, solving the discretized
governing equations on the discretized geometry and finally viewing the results obtained
at the discrete points (cell centers, nodes, etc). The solution at the discrete points for
the governing equations is obtained by the solver. Therefore, it is the solver that has the
governing equations transformed into the discretized form using one of the discretization
techniques (FDM, FVM or FEM) and performing the solution of these equations.

Depending on which discretization technique is employed in the solver, the PDEs stating
the governing principles in mathematical form are converted into algebraic equations
using the initial and boundary conditions. These algebraic equations are obtained at each
of the points (cell-centers, nodes, etc) where the solution for the variables (u, v, w, T,
etc) is to be obtained. The final algebraic equation set results in a matrix which has to
be solved for obtaining values of the variables at each of those points. Due to the non-
linearity of the governing equations which are converted into algebraic equations
through some approximation techniques, this procedure of obtaining the algebraic
equations and solving the resulting matrix is an iterative procedure. The bound on the
number of iterations is enforced through convergence criteria (defined by the user). This
whole process involves computing at a large number of points (depending on the size of
the grid) for each of the governing equations. The task becomes especially daunting
when the individual equations are closely coupled to each other, due to which they
cannot be solved separately, but have to be considered together. Such problems on
complicated geometries with huge cell count call for high capacity RAM (Random Access
Memory) from the computer. Besides, solving these equations iteratively to the required
convergence criteria demands high speed RAM. It is a widely accepted fact that the
requirements of the simulation industry have been accelerating the growth in the
computer hardware industry. It is because of these reasons that nowadays, CFD
simulation is possible on Desktop computers. With more physics models being
incorporated into CFD, there is still a huge demand for high-speed computational
capabilities. The advancement in fast numerical techniques may compensate for the lag
that the computer hardware industry has in catering to the CFD requirements.

The Solver offers the user to define:

1. Different mechanisms and models (e.g., turbulence models, moving/deforming

mesh)
2. Incorporate different physics (e.g., phase change, real-gas formulations)
3. Adjust the numerical parameters (e.g., face-approximation techniques, under-
relaxation factors)
4. Convergence criteria (e.g., residuals accepted, lift and drag coefficients monitors)
and
5. Time-step for calculations (not valid for steady-state analysis).

The ability to choose the appropriate models for capturing the actual physics and to
fiddle with the numerical parameters is an art that one learns through experience in
CFD. Different Solver packages offer customized solutions for specific industrial
problems.