The Best Practice Guidelines for CFD: A European Initiative on Quality and Trust (Keynote)

In the industrial application of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), the quality of simulations and the level of reliability of the results have emerged as major issues of concern. This paper describes a recent initiative of ERCOFTAC (European Research Community on Flow Turbulence and Combustion), involving European code developers, code vendors, academics and industrial users, to set up a practical set of standard guidelines to improve the quality of CFD simulations and to help in the assessment of the trustworthiness of the CFD results. The initiative led to the publication of the first edition of the ERCOFTAC Best Practice Guidelines (BPG) in January 2000. The BPG provide generic advice on how to perform quality CFD calculations. Some examples of typical guidelines from the BPG are provided in this paper.