Looking beyond the convenient answer

Industrial CFD has become exceptionally good at answering the questions that are cheap to ask. But what happens when the assumptions that make a calculation affordable — steady flow, wall functions, simplified turbulence modelling — suppress the physics that matters in determining the answer?

Twenty Years On: Why Are We Still Running Steady RANS?

In 2006, I presented work at the THIESEL conference examining diesel-engine intake-port flow using transient CFD and hybrid low-Reynolds-number near-wall modelling. Twenty years later, the computational resources available to engineers have increased enormously, yet many of the same modelling assumptions remain. Where is that computational improvement being spent? And are we, as engineers, obtaining the best answers to our questions?

Read: Twenty years on — Why are we still running steady RANS?→