MTP Curriculum > CFD Summer Workshop

CFD Summer Workshop

Figure 1: Geometric Formulation - Surface Mesh (Click figure to enlarge.)

In collaboration with CFD vendors and industrial advisors, the NSF/CRCD faculty offers an intense one-week summer workshop that provides an introductory experience for undergraduate and graduate students in the art of using commercial CFD software. The student obtains a working knowledge of CFD tools in a workshop environment by solving single-phase complex flow problems, as exemplified by the center-gated disk flow that arises in polymer processing applications.

The workshop environment reviews background information related to numerical methods and single-phase transport phenomena and, thereby, supports the student's participation in the MTP Internet course. Industrial mentors and CFD vendors challenge the student design teams with practical problems. The multidisciplinary, multiuniversity teams use a commercial CFD code to explore issues related to the industrial case studies while participating in the MTP Internet course. The following list of activities characterizes the summer workshop experience.

• Lansing Lugnuts Baseball Game
• Laboratory Demonstrations
• Unix Workstation Training
• Web Site Training
• Transport Phenomena Workshop
• CFD Workshop
• Breakout Sessions: Industrial Case Studies
• Symposium on Computational Analysis of Multiphase Problems
• Student Design Team Presentation

The student works in a team and learns to use a commercial grid generation program to produce a computational mesh and how to interpret CFD results by using analytical methods and other observations (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: CFD Validation Paradigm (Click figure to enlarge.)

Figures 3 and 4 show the pressure distribution and the radial velocity distribution within the center-gated disk predicted by a direct numerical solution of the Navier-Stokes equation. These CFD results complement the analytical results based on the creeping flow approximation applied in the outer region of the flow field.

Figure 3: Result Validation - Pressure Profile (Click figure to enlarge.)	Figure 4: Radial Profiles - Radial Velocity (Click figure to enlarge.)