Milad Mafi, Academic Program Manager, SimScale GmbH
Background
As early as the 19th century, the Navier-Stokes equation, which completely describes the motion of fluid substances, was devised. For the first time, it became possible to describe any fluid flow field mathematically. Up to that time, scientists and engineers had only made available models for simple phenomena such as pipe flows.
It was not until a 100 years later, however, that this milestone of science could be applied for engineering problems. The reason is to be found in the mathematical properties of the Navier-Stokes equation, which can not be solved analytically, but numerically, for complex flow phenomena. In this case the differential equation for energy, impulse and mass conservation is discretized spatially and temporally. These, together with boundary and initial conditions, results in a linear system of equations which is iteratively solved. Only with the rise of computer technology in the second half of the 20th century it became possible to solve this very large system of linear equations and therefore simulate the motion of fluid substances. At the time, as nowadays, simulation was a trade-off between accuracy and time: even today?s most powerful supercomputer would need years to predict the flow field around a small object without major simplifications like the usage of turbulence models and time related averaging.
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