Recent Advances in Computational Fluid Dynamics

Fluid dynamics is an excellent example of how recent advances in computational tools and techniques permit the rapid advance of basic and applied science. The development of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has opened new areas of research and has significantly supplemented information available from experimental measurements. Scientific computing is directly responsible for such recent developments as the secondary instability theory of transition to turbulence, dynamical systems analyses of routes to chaos, ideas on the geometry of turbulence, direct simulations of turbulence, three-dimensional full-aircraft flow analyses, and so on. We believe that CFD has already achieved a status in the tool-kit of fluid mechanicians equal to that of the classical scientific techniques of mathematical analysis and laboratory experiment.