Welcome

Introduction

Welcome! I am an engineer in the refining industry, and I am fascinated by fluids, physics, and numerical computation.  I set out to teach myself computational fluid dynamics. This guide represents a milestone in those efforts, as well as my attempt to make the journey easier for others.

Motivation

The themes of this guide are specificity and unification.

While teaching myself CFD I noticed two things:

  1. Information was available and plentiful, but disjointed
  2. Most of the information was not tailored specifically to the process industry

Ideally, this tutorial will function as a streamlined introduction to CFD with practical examples from industry (i.e. we are going to simulate flow in pipes!)

Overview

This beginners guide will take you step by step from installation to simulation of incompressible flow through an orifice plate in 3D.  The idea is to both develop hands-on, practical knowledge of CFD, and to flesh out some of the pertinent theoretical ideas.

Prerequisites

This is a beginner’s guide, so I want to keep the required background light. Quite honestly, if you skipped the theoretical sections and just worked through the hands-on material, one could get by with no prior training.
If you want to make the most out of the theory sections, then some background in calculus and fluid mechanics will be helpful.

I plan on explaining most of the ideas we need, so don’t worry too much. None of this stuff is rocket science.

Onward to the installation section!

Contents