The Design of an Applied Computational Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer Course Facilitating the Cloud Computation Technology

Traditional computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer (CFDHT) courses, which are mostly at the graduate level, focus on the application of numerical methods to solve the system of nonlinear differential equations that govern fluid flow and heat transfer, with some initial and boundary conditions. However, due to the limited computational resources available for classroom instruction, the problems used for illustration and laboratory assignments are limited to simple canonical types. This means that students will not be able to analyze realistic problems with practical applications, which are inherently complicated, computationally expensive, and require high-performance computing (HPC) clusters that take advantage of massive parallelization. In this paper, a course in the curriculum that addresses this issue is proposed. In this course, the fundamental theories of high-performance computing will first be introduced. Then, a commercial CFDHT package, AEROFLO Cloud, operated based on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, will be presented. The software is deployed on a Cloud server that has been optimized for high-performance computing and is accessible via a web browser. Students will use the software package to set up realistic CFDHT projects, run the simulations on the cloud, and visualize and post-process the simulation results on the cloud. The modeling and visualization tasks can be carried out with a personal classroom computer (PC) with an Internet connection. Several laboratory (simulation) projects based on practical applications are proposed, and the methods required to analyze the simulation results will be taught. In terms of the seven current ABET Student Outcomes (SOs), it is envisioned that, with the appropriate performance indices, the course will contribute to satisfying SO (1): Identify, formulate, and solve complex engineering problems, SO (5): Ability to function effectively on a team whose members together provide leadership, create a collaborative and inclusive environment, establish goals, plan tasks, and meet objectives, and SO (7): Ability to acquire and apply new knowledge as needed, using appropriate learning strategies. Student reporting requirements and the necessary rubrics are incorporated to enable the assessment of the various performance indices for the ABET SO's.