Time for an upgrade! Far beyond the single purpose testing facility, the modern towing tank expanded into a Swiss Army knife of experiments. Armed with new gadgets and advanced capabilities. Time to see what new tricks the tank holds for us!

It may look like a swimming pool, but towing tanks exist for a different purpose. Dragging models down the tank propelled the science of ship design forward across the years. These pools deliver critical measurements for ship hydrodynamics. Discover why we pay such a high price for a fundamental tool of ship design.

In computational fluid dynamics (CFD), we often need to model scenarios that involve more than one fluid. Volume of fluid modeling (VOF) expands the capabilities of CFD to allow limitless combinations of different fluids. The world of VOF encompasses everything from droplets of diesel spraying in cylinder all the way up to tsunami waves crashing against the city of Tokyo. How does VOF achieve this, and what are the implications for CFD modeling?

Mesh deformation is incredibly frustrating, complicated, unstable . . . and unavoidable if you want to incorporate body motions into CFD. Modeling body motion demands mesh deformation, changing the mesh on the fly, while using it to solve transport equations. As you might expect, that brings a host of new challenges. This reviews several new strategies that the CFD engineers needs to consider.

When we add the time domain, simulations change from modeling steady scenarios to unsteady, where boundary conditions change over time. Beyond the physics, modeling unsteady flow requires a few changes to the CFD solver. Inner iterations, timestep, Courant Number, and data management all enter into the strategy for the CFD engineer. Today we discuss each of these.