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Proposal: Computational Fluid Dynamics

This is intended to start a conversation rather than challenge the merit of this proposal. What will distinguish this site from others on the network? In particular, I'm a mod at Matter Modeling SE, and it seems like any CFD questions could fit just as well on that site. Admittedly, we haven't seen many such questions as of yet, but the community appears welcome to them.

If the goal is to have a very specifically tailored site, I can understand that, but it may be difficult to generate enough support to sustain on its own. Matter Modeling in principle has a broader scope, but we are still working diligently to keep up our daily activity more than half year into the life of the site.

So to reiterate, what does this site hope to accomplish that isn't done effectively by other sites on the network?

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    one "problem with community" I discover is that many people just don't have account on StackOverflow - the "Area51" is something totally "abstract" from them. For instance I post information about proposal in two CFD facebook groups, each with more than 10k members - and I get support and "likes" from them - but hey have problem with "login" to Area51. People who only push Orange "follow" button without login and put their email are not count by te system (it is bug?) - I check this by myself too - not works :( – Kamil Kiełczewski Nov 23 '20 at 22:38
  • @KamilKiełczewski getting people onto Area51 was definitely a hurdle for us (Nike Dattani, the user who proposed our site and laid a majority of the groundwork getting it started, can attest to that). It is tough to get people to buy into a new site and tougher still where there are technical issues with the sign up page. – Tyberius Nov 23 '20 at 22:51
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    There's this bug, and cited in that post are another 11 posts discussing such bugs, then there's this bug which is closer to what you described, then also this bug. – Nike Dattani Nov 24 '20 at 0:00
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    The Computational Science stack is another relevant comparison, perhaps even more relevant than Matter Modeling. I haven't spent much time there myself, but it has a lot of questions under its fluid dynamics tag already. – Anyon Nov 24 '20 at 16:32
  • @Anyon that's true, I didn't realize this was already a pretty active area on Computational Science. It would probably help to see if people asking CFD there feel like they need their own site or not – Tyberius Nov 24 '20 at 17:47
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This is my private limited point of view on CFD

CFD is a very specific field with its problems and solutions, its large community, and very wide applications. It is a young multidisciplinary field that brings together mathematicians, physicists, programmers and engineers - workers, scientists, students and hobbyists.

A lot of CFD community members use some old-style forum/wiki systems to exchange informations. Probably a lot of them never heard about stack-overflow-type sites - so it will take time for them to get used to.

Currently - as you indicated in the comments (in main question) - someone who has a question in the field of CFD must refer to non-cfd-specialized sources based on stack-overflow engine. CFD is not easy - and this situation not helps too much.

I think that if CFD-Overflow will start, we will attract specialists here over time and everyone will benefit from it - both people with CFD-problems and the entire community. But I aware that this need time

I will cite this journal to give you more info about CFD "size/complexity" :

CFD is now considered an indispensable analysis/design tool in an ever-increasing range of industrial applications. Practical flow problems are often so complex that a high level of ingenuity is required. Thus, besides the development work in CFD, innovative CFD applications are also encouraged. PCFD's ultimate goal is to provide a common platform for model/software developers and users by balanced international/interdisciplinary contributions, disseminating information relating to development/refinement of mathematical and numerical models, software tools and their innovative applications in CFD.

CFD-related topics

  • Turbulence
  • Two-phase flows
  • Heat transfer
  • Chemical reactions and combustion
  • Acoustics
  • Unsteady flows
  • Free-surfaces
  • Fluid-solid interaction
  • Navier-Stokes solution techniques for incompressible and compressible flows
  • Discretisation methods and schemes
  • Convergence acceleration procedures
  • Grid generation and adaptation techniques
  • Mesh-free methods

(and much more)

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