Computing
fluid flow
The
academia and industry exchanged notes on computational fluid dynamics
at the first Fluent CFD Conference for India and Southeast Asia
 |
| Dr
Ferit Boyson inaugurating the conference |
Academia
met industry at the 3-day conference on Computational Fluid Dynamics
(CFD) convened by Fluent India at Pune between November 18 and 20, 2003.
The
event was an attempt to bring to the forefront the current trends and
future potential of CFD in India. CFD has helped engineering organisations
worldwide achieve global competitiveness by reducing design cycles and
cutting prototyping costs. The conference aimed at putting into perspective
the significance of CFD in a wide array of applications across various
industries like aerospace, appliances, automotive, chemical, consumer
products, environment, marine, oil and gas, polymers processing, power,
minerals and materials.
The
conference saw representatives from leading research institutes and
laboratories across the country turn up in full force to share their
opinion on CFD and its existing and potential uses. Amongst the institutes
to participate were Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indian Institute
of Science (IISc), University Institute of Chemical Technology (UICT)
and National Chemical Laboratory (NCL). To relate the experience of
CFD users from the industry were representatives of Bharat Heavy Electricals
(BHEL), General Electric (GE), Indian Oil Corporation, Infosys, Kirlosker
Copeland, National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC), Reliance, Tata
Steel and Tata Consultancy Services, to name a few.
The
event was inaugurated by Damodar Padhi, Chief Operating Officer – Engineering
Analysis Centre of Excellence, John F Welch Technology Centre, GE. Underlining
the importance of computer aided engineering today Mr Padhi said, “As
technologies become more sophisticated, engineers can no longer rely
on thumb rules or hand calculations for design. Numerical models to
predict the behaviour of components and flows have always been, and
still are, a favourite topic for academia. These models sprung to life
in the last decade as computing power made it possible to solve the
numerics in time spans that made business sense. Computer-aided engineering
is now vital to the key growth factors for GE.”
The
first session of the day was dedicated to giving an overview of CFD
applications in various industries in India and abroad. The speakers
included Dr S Sivaram, Director, NCL, Dr AL Chandrakar, Chief (TC),
BHEL, Professor JB Joshi, UICT, Professor AM Deshpande, IISc and Dr
Kuruchi Kumar from Institute of High Performance Computing, Singapore.
Dr Chandrakar said that BHEL’s experience showed that CFD solvers can
be applied to complicated flow domain, and that they yield excellent
qualitative results. “However,” he qualified, “experimental verification
is still needed in many areas. The accuracy of quantitative prediction
depends upon many factors such as geometrical modelling, flow modelling
including boundary layers, solver’s robustness, among others.” Professor
JB Joshi discussed the current status and potential of CFD for designing
process equipment. He also talked about the difficulties in realising
some of the potential of CFD models and possible ways to move forward.
Dr Kumar’s talk focused on the ongoing CFD research in the areas of
multiphase flows, fire and combustion modelling and micro-fluidics in
Singapore. Professor Deshpande gave an update on the contribution of
CFD to India’s aerospace programme.
....CONTD
