Benchmarking COMSOL - Part 2: CFD Problems

Darrell Pepper
Professor of Mechanical Engineering,
University of Nevada - Las Vegas
Published in 2009

Using COMSOL 3.5a, a set of benchmark problems requiring the use of the COMSOL Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) module has been simulated. Several of the problems include fluid-heat transfer interactions (Computational Heat Transfer - CHT). The four problems are:

  1. flow over a 2-D circular cylinder
  2. compressible flow in a shock tube
  3. incompressible heated flow over a 2-D backward facing step for Re = 800 (laminar) and non-heated flow over a 2-D backward facing step for Re = 47,648 (turbulent)
  4. natural convective flow within an air-filled, articulated 3-D cubic enclosure with Rayleigh number Ra = 105

Results compared with data in the literature show good agreement. The CPU times and memory costs for solving these problems are also reported.

Keynote speaker's biography:

Darrell Pepper is presently Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Nevada Center for Advanced Computational Methods (NCACM) at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). In 2004 he was appointed an ASME Congressional Fellow and handled science and engineering issues. Dr. Pepper is also Executive Vice President of Nevada Energy and Environmental Systems. He has published over 200 technical papers on fluid dynamics, heat transfer, and environmental transport topics, and co-authored five textbooks on the finite element method, boundary element method, and indoor air quality.

Darrell Pepper was one of the keynote speakers at the COMSOL User's Conference, fall 2009 in Boston.

Download