Experience reveals that, in the industrial context at least, CFD is a difficult technology to apply successfully. The practitioner must be highly skilled and knowledgeable in order to set up and/or select model inputs appropriately, and then to be in a position to interpret the results reliably against design or assessment requirements. A degree of uncertainty tends to prevail even in the hands of an expert. In short, the practice of CFD must be viewed as a knowledge-based activity. Despite the fact that highly sophisticated CFD analysis codes are widely available, the construction of this all important knowledge base has received little attention until now. The EU-funded collaborative project QNET-CFD has spent four years assembling and collating knowledge and know-how across a range of applications from a wide variety of sources. The outcome is an electronically configured knowledge base (KB), hierarchically structured around the notions of Application Areas (e.g. external aerodynamics, combustion and heat transfer, environment etc.), Application Challenges and Underlying Flow Regimes. An Application Challenge (AC) is a realistic industrial test case which can be used to judge the competency and limitations of CFD for a given Application Area. An Underlying Flow Regime (UFR) is a generic, well studied test case capturing important elements of the key flow physics encountered in one or more AC. Each AC and UFR features best practice advice providing guidance on model set-up decisions and the interpretation of results.
The KB will be launched shortly into the public domain under the stewardship of ERCOFTAC. However the flavour of its content as well as its look and feel can be explored now at http://eddie.mech.surrey.ac.uk. ERCOFTAC is keen to elicit feed back from the CFD user community in order to gauge potential interest in the KB and, most importantly, to guide how it should be launched so as to ensure that users’ needs are best served (i.e. should the whole KB be licensed or should it be made available at the Application Area, AC or UFR levels or a combination of these). A short questionnaire has been placed on the web-site for this purpose. This can be processed easily whilst browsing the KB and returned to ERCOFTAC by the click of a button. Users are encouraged to log-on and send ERCOFTAC their views.
