Fluid thinking

In our last exposé on CFD/FEA we mentioned that mother nature never does anything 'discretely'. Natural phenomena derive from a complex interaction of physical attributes involving stress, vibration, fluid flow, heat transfer and more.

While it is true that computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years, multi-physics analysis (MPA) — the analysis of real world mixed physics events — has become a realisable dream.

As we tend to ignore non-linearities in general purpose analysis, the effects of physical realms beyond the one we are investigating often escape attention. But anyone doing non-linear analysis will testify that there comes a point when you simply have to include complex phenomena. 'Solving the problem that you can solve easily, rather than the one which needs solving, can only get you so far,' said Laurence Marks, of UK multi-physics company

.

Many problems can be solved adequately in a single physical domain without considering the effects of cross coupling (as until now we could not do it cheaply or easily). There is, however, a whole range of problems in which the coupling between physical realms cannot be ignored. Advances in computing power mean that problems once thought intractable can now often be solved.