FluidModeling (2005-11-30 04:08:12)

Hardcore developer brainstorming on fluid modeling

Fluid can be liquids or gases where flow or heat-transfer properties are of interest, particularly when they interact with container wall or other solid materials (pipe, cylinder, fan, etc...) .

Desings that benefit from fluid modelling

Experimenting with real hardware is expensive. Much material, tool and machining (human - time) resources are needed.

There are software tools to model the behaviour with high precision. At least 30% of Ferrari's formula-1 success is from such fluid-modeling tools (the engine, the chassis with spoilers, radiators, and flow around them, brakes).


Off the shelf tools

A respected provider of such tools is [ Fluent].


In the guts of fluid-modelling tools

These tools work with finite-element models. The heat and particle-flow equations are solved for the boundaries with sufficient time-granularity.

Interestingly the basic equations of fluid modeling can be described in 10 pages. A few years ago when I looked into it, I even found compilable code in a book at the library. At that time I found no usable opensource software on the internet.

Most likely the first 2 items are relatively simple, but the other parts are prohibitive.


Opensource tools

Today there are some interesting stuff up there.

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