Finite elements and object-oriented implementation techniques in computational fluid dynamics Original Research Article

A unified, flexible and extensible framework for simulating viscous fluid flow, using object-oriented programming techniques, is presented. With this framework at hand, it is easy to implement and test new solution approaches and to compare available solution methods in a given physical problem. Several strategies for solving the Navier–Stokes equations are implemented and tested, and some test cases are presented. An extension of the framework to turbulence modeling and two-phase flow is also demonstrated. The flexibility and modularity of CFD codes that we advocate in the present paper are considerable easier to achieve using object-orientation than the programming techniques that currently dominate the field of CFD.