Fluid Flow Phenomena: A Numerical Toolkit

This book deals with the simulation of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations for laminar and turbulent flows. The book is limited to explaining and employing the finite difference method. It furnishes a large number of source codes which permit to play with the Navier-Stokes equations and to understand the complex physics related to fluid mechanics. Numerical simulations are useful tools to understand the complexity of the flows, which often is difficult to derive from laboratory experiments. This book, then, can be very useful to scholars doing laboratory experiments, since they often do not have extra time to study the large variety of numerical methods; furthermore they cannot spend more time in transferring one of the methods into a computer language. By means of numerical simulations, for example, insights into the vorticity field can be obtained which are difficult to obtain by measurements. This book can be used by graduate as well as undergraduate students while reading books on theoretical fluid mechanics; it teaches how to simulate the dynamics of flow fields on personal computers. This will provide a better way of understanding the theory. Two chapters on Large Eddy Simulations have been included, since this is a methodology that in the near future will allow more universal turbulence models for practical applications. The direct simulation of the Navier-Stokes equations (DNS) is simple by finite-differences, that are satisfactory to reproduce the dynamics of turbulent flows. A large part of the book is devoted to the study of homogeneous and wall turbulent flows. In the second chapter the elementary concept of finite difference is given to solve parabolic and elliptical partial differential equations. In successive chapters the 1D, 2D, and 3D Navier-Stokes equations are solved in Cartesian and cylindrical coordinates. Finally, Large Eddy Simulations are performed to check the importance of the subgrid scale models. Results for turbulent and laminar flows are discussed, with particular emphasis on vortex dynamics. This volume will be of interest to graduate students and researchers wanting to compare experiments and numerical simulations, and to workers in the mechanical and aeronautic industries.