Lessons learned in adopting a CFD package

Abstract

Luxury of elective undergraduate or graduate engineering courses, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is being rapidly adapted in the introductory Fluid Mechanics courses. This in large part became possible with an introduction of FlowLab, which is specifically designed for this purpose. The software is available with several Fluid Mechanics textbooks for free for the duration of the course. It arrives with several base modules addressing both internal and external flows. It is designed to simplify instructor's work and to accelerate student learning by streamlining such issues as geometry, meshing, application of boundary conditions, and data post processing. However, such a simplicity carries its drawbacks allowing the instructor only limited capabilities in adapting the software. The experiences of introducing the FlowLab into the Fluid Mechanics course at "The Institution" were mixed. The course is offered with an integrated laboratory. Complexities arise from the need to introduce the fluid mechanics fundamentals before any productive work in FlowLab could be performed, leaving limited time for thorough integration. After a few introductory demonstrations and tutorials, students used FlowLab to simulate the experimental results from the converging-diverging channel, flow over cylinder and flow over airfoil laboratories. The results were mixed from an excellent agreement in the case of the airfoil and to questionable in the case of the flow over cylinder. Nevertheless, in all cases FlowLab was an excellent tool in visualizing the flow. Adaptation of the software created more work for students, which reflected in their responses. Overall students' interest ranged from cold to very excited, asking for capabilities to solve realworld problems. A number of high quality publications have recently appeared on the topic discussing the issues of implementing and integrating the package into the existing courses and the redesign of teaching philosophy. This paper continues the discussion reconfirming that further improvements are warranted on the instruction side as well as on the part of the software developers. © American Society for Engineering Education, 2007.