Summary

Citation

Nithiarasu, P. (2008), "Summary", International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow, Vol. 18 No. 7/8. https://doi.org/10.1108/hff.2008.13418gaa.001

Summary

Article Type: Guest editorial From: International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow, Volume 18, Issue 7/8

This two part special issue collates selected papers presented at the 14th International Conference on Finite Elements in Flow Problems held at Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, March 26-28, 2007. These papers were presented at the special session on Computational Methods for Heat and Fluid Flow, organised by Perumal Nithiarasu and Roland Lewis. We thank all the participants of the special session and also thank the authors that have contributed to this special issue.

A total of 11 papers have been included in this special issue. These papers are divided into two categories. The first category includes fundamental papers in the area of computational heat and fluid flow and the second category includes five papers on the applications of numerical methods to interesting problems of heat and fluid flow.

The first fundamental paper discusses a unified model to solve fluid flow, heat transfer and electro-kinetics in solid oxide fuel cells (Arpino et al., 2008). A novel and unified approach is proposed and demonstrated. In the second paper by Principe and Codina (2008), a new stabilized formulation is proposed to deal with low speed thermally coupled flows. The low-Mach number approximation for thermally driven flows is one of the challenging areas of computational research and the authors have tackled this using a stabilized formulation in this paper. The third paper (Kosec and Šarler, 2008) introduces a local pressure correction method for solving thermo-fluid dynamics problems. This paper also uses a radial basis function-based method to solve heat convection problems. A multi-scale modelling approach is introduced to model flow and heat transfer through a porous medium in the paper by Sozer and Shyy (2008). In their paper, the empirical dependance of the flow is eliminated by solving the flow in individual, representative pores. Visser et al. (2008) introduced an artificial compressibility method to solve buoyancy driven flows in fluid saturated porous media. The novelty of this paper is in the introduction of the artificial compressibility method to equations with strong source terms. The last paper on the fundamental thermal flow issue is presented by Nithiarasu and Lewis (2008). They propose a consistent and new non-dimensional scaling for solving electro-osmotic flow induced heat generation.

The second part of this special issue consists of five application papers. The first one is the flow and temperature distribution in a human finger model created from MR imaging (He et al., 2008). This paper clearly demonstrates the application in detail along with the need for such a model. Comini et al. (2008) have studied conjugate heat transfer, flow and mass transfer in tube-fin heat exchangers using the finite element method. The importance of the ratio between latent and overall rates of heat transfer is clearly demonstrated by the authors. An innovative heat storage system for solar power plants is designed by Salomoni et al. (2008). The thermal analysis of the proposed tank design is presented in detail by the authors. The last two papers describe the application of adaptive finite element methods for heat transfer. The first one deals with hp-adaptive finite element method for enclosures with partitions (Pepper and Wang, 2008) and the second one is on the h-adaptive method for geodynamics problems (Davies et al., 2008).

The guest editor is grateful to the Editor, Professor Roland Lewis, for allowing him to produce this special issue.

P. NithiarasuSchool of Engineering, University of Wales Swansea, Swansea, UK