High Performance Scientific Computing and its Application in Solving Engineering Problems

Summary

Industrial developments that involve fluid flows with heat and mass transfer presently rely heavily on engineering experience gained from experimental investigations and from actual applications. The discipline called High Performance Scientific Computing can provide support to engineering developments through results obtained by numerical simulations. This is most clearly perceptible in the field of numerical fluid mechanics where program developments are underway to compute fluid flows with complex boundaries and involving heat and mass transfer. At the Institute of Fluid Mechanics at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, the development of computer programs is underway in cooperation with institutes of mathematics and computer science at the Technical University of Munich and other institutes at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. The present paper summarizes the computer program developments and shows that two-dimensional and three-dimensional computer programs are available to compute steady and unsteady fluid flows of compressible and incompressible media. Multigrid solution algorithms are incorporated into the programs and speed up the solution considerably. All programs are parallelized and can be run on computers of different architectures. The present paper shows how programs of this kind might be used in various industrial applications where fluid flow phenomena involving heat and mass transfer are important.