Importance of CFD in undergraduate-level fluid dynamics course

In most undergraduate-level fluid dynamics courses in engineering schools, students learn how to solve simple flow problems analytically with hand calculations. Most real-world fluid flow problems, however, involve nonlinear behaviors which cannot be solved analytically. Numerical methods allow us to solve and analyze nonlinear flow problems and this field of study is called Computation Fluid Dynamics (CFD). CFD has been widely used in both academic and industrial problems to analyze complex nonlinear systems and investigate parametric effects to obtain optimal solutions with relatively low cost compared to experiments. Therefore, it is beneficial for students to learn the basic idea of CFD and have experience in performing simple simulations using CFD software. For this purpose, the undergraduate Fluid Dynamics course is designed to include CFD as a special topic.