Expert: Mark Janus - 7/24/2006

Question
Hi Mark,
      I am a student of Aeronautical Engg. I study in 2nd year in the 3rd semester. I wanted to know what is fluid mechanics? What importance does it have in Aeronauical Engg. And can you give you some basic knowledge on Fluid Meechanics. And what is its relation to CFD.
Awaiting for your kind reply.
Thnaking you,
Ruchik

Answer
Hi, Sorry for the delay...

Fluid mechanics is the study of how a fluid (a substance that can't support a shear load, but only offers resistance to it) behaves.  As you can imagine, air is a fluid and since we seek to "fly" airplanes through this media, we must understand how it behaves or reacts to the body (the airplane).  The name fluid mechanics is actually used for both fluid statics (the study of a stationary fluid) and fluid dynamics (the study of a moving fluid).  CFD stands for Computational Fluid Dynamics, basically the mathematical equations which describe how fluids behave when in motion are so complicated that we must solve them with a computer....  that area of research (the solving of the equations of fluid motion) is called CFD.  We solve the equations and can predict how a body will behave when moving through a fluid (like a car or an airplane) without ever actually running a physical experiment.

Hope this helps,
mj