i am a mechanical engineering student. i am interested in CFD. how can i start off on it? how do i know if its the right field for me? i am interested deeply in fluid mechanics and have done well at that subject. vikram

Try the site www.cham.co.uk, It contains excellent introductry information about CFD and their product PHOENICS which is believed to be the first CFD package in the world. If you find the area is intersting then try a simplified CFD book like those written by Anderson, J. David.

Take a look at

http://www.cfd-online.com/Resources/misc.html#intros,

where Jonas has assembled a long list of resources. It appears that several of these are part of the web sites for commercial codes. By reading more than one, you will get an appreciation of the different philosophies that are behind the various vendors' products.

Happy Hunting!

although there is a good section on the cham website i wouldnt say the package itself is very representative of modern comercial codes, (it still looks like the first cfd package!). The "Big Three" are Star-CD (www.cd.co.uk), Fluent (www.fluent.com) and CFX (www.cfx.aeat.com) another usefull resource is the full text version of using comuptational fluid dynamics by ct shaw (http://www.eng.warwick.ac.uk/staff/cts/cfdbook/) which is a full text online version. Joel

Hi Joel, Do you know a similar website as http://www.eng.warwick.ac.uk/staff/cts/cfdbook/

but using FLUENT as an example instead of PHOENICS.

thank you

no sorry i dont, there is quite a lot of cfd resources out there, check out the resources page on this site. When i was an undergrad a lot of the stuff on there helped me out when learning CFD. As for fluent specific i am not sure, i doubt that there are many code specific books out there that concenrate on the basics. I can recomend some basic generall books but nothing on fluent. Joel

thanks a lot everyone for your help and support. i read the book and cfd seems like my cup of teayeah i like the subject quite a bit. thanks again vikram