Is there any ranking of the academic institutions

working on CFD?

T.K.S.

I don't think so. Because it may take three years to work out a numerical algorithm, and another three years to develope a 3-D mesh generation scheme, and another three years to come up with a turbulence model, and another year to put all these together, that is almost ten years. I think, it is difficult to keep a student in a graduate school for ten years. Frankly speaking, not many researchers have a complete understanding of every aspect of CFD. A seven-year intensive CFD course probably will be able to train a student capable of handling all aspects of CFD. Otherwise, most students will have difficulties in applying CFD to real-world problems after graduation. But , there is a short cut, that is, you can spend one week to attend a commercial CFD code training course, and then start using the code to solve the problem. In this approach, most of the time, you can cut down the time to solve a problem to six months or so. Unfortunately, you can't teach students a black box at school.

Not really. Because CFD is such an inter-discipline subject, it is hard to have academic ranking. Also it is pretty much application driven. However, most universities in various department offer some CFD programs. Depending on your discipline and interests, you maybe able to find something suitable. For example, if you are an AE and interested in compressible or high speed algorithm, Virginia Polytech or Princeton are good candidates. Incompressible, UMIST or Imperial Collage. CE, U. of Iowa (Hy

Not really. Because CFD is such an inter-discipline subject, it is hard to have academic ranking. Also it is pretty much application driven. However, most universities in various department offer some CFD programs. Depending on your discipline and interests, you maybe able to find something suitable. For example, if you are an AE and interested in compressible or high speed algorithm, Virginia Polytech or Princeton are good candidates. Incompressible, UMIST or Imperial Collage. CE, U. of Iowa (Hydraulic Inst)...Finite Element, U.Texa (Austin)..etc.... In any case, you need to do a little research before you get into a CFD program. The Resouece section in cfd-onlin.com should be a good starting point.

I haven't seen any official ranking. One hint on where there is a lot of CFD activity is to look at the visitor stats of this site. This doesn't say that much about the quality, but it at least gives you a few places to start looking. During the last 6 months of 1998 the top-10 visiting US Universitites were:

1.University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2.Georgia Institute of Technology

3.Texas A&M University

4.University of Maryland

5.University of California, Irvine

6.Pennsylvania State University

7.Stanford University

8.Massahusetts Institute of Technology

9.Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

10.Stony Brook, State University of New York

You can find more stats at:

http://www.cfd-online.com/Stats/