Microfluidics: Modeling, Mechanics and Mathematics

Chapter 29

Computational Fluid Dynamics

29.1 Introduction

Modern fluid mechanical problems would be impossible to solve without the use of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). As we have seen, the scope of analytical solutions to fundamental equations of fluid mechanics is very limited and, once a more difficult geometry is encountered, we usually have to choose a given numerical method for obtaining a solution. In the following sections we will study the most important techniques in CFD, namely weighted residual methods with the most important algorithm being the Galerkin method (see section 29.2), and spectral methods (see section 29.2.4), FDM (see section 30), FVM (see section 31), and FEM (see section 32). All of these methods have their ...