Application of numerical techniques in fluid mechanics

Abstract

More than sixty years ago Theodore von Kármán showed in a paper entitled Über die Turbulenzreibung verschiedener Flüssigkeiten (On turbulent friction of various fluids) how the pressure drop of various fluid flows through pipes could be correlated in a single curve. The correlation parameter he used is now known as Reynolds number. It had been named after Osborne Reynolds only three years earlier in 1908 by A. Sommerfeld, shordy after he had left Aachen, in a note at the Internationaler Mathematiker Kongress in Rome. Sommerfeld had recognised the importance of Reynolds' similarity law and was deeply persuaded by his experimental and theoretical work.