Should We Still Teach CFD to our Students

CFD is now a mature field. It has grown from a scientific research activity into a successful commercial venture. Industry used to hire bachelors and Masters' students with some previous exposure to CFD because the work involved coding modifications to some CFD program in order to deal with some new analysis problem. Today many industries license commercial CFD software to fill most of their needs. Our graduates now seldom perform changes to CFD codes. They use commercial software to solve complex flow problems. While such activities do not involve coding it still requires a working knowledge of basic numerical methods and CFD techniques. Employers expect our graduates to be enlightened users of CFD tools. This poses new challenges to the development of a curriculum in mechanical and aerospace engineering: we must produce trained users of CFD tools rather than code developers. This paper presents our experience, at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, with teaching Computer Assisted Fluid Mechanics to senior students majoring in mechanical and aeronautical engineering. In this course the emphasis is not on the details of the numerical algorithms and their coding. The focus is on the practical use of theoretical properties of CFD methods to obtain "good" results.