Guidelines for Use of Commercial Software and Diagnostics in Articles for the Journal of Fluids Engineering

This document seeks to supplement, but not replace, existing ournal of Fluids Engineering JFE author guidance for numerial accuracy and experimental uncertainty that may be found at 1 and provide helpful guidance to authors about how to judge he archival value and present their results from commercial softare and diagnostics. The past 10 years has seen a dramatic increase in the quality nd usability of commercial software and diagnostics that were ormally considered as topics of research. In particular, the advent f commercial computational fluid dynamics CFD 1–5 and oftware/hardware for particle image velocimetry PIV are two xamples that have practically revolutionized the way fluids engieering is being performed. The question that this article attempts o address is “when does commercially available software or dignostics no longer become of intrinsic “archival” value and how hould they be used to generate archival information?” For exmple, using a commercial CFD code as a “black box” to produce ngineering design results does not mean that the results are of rchival value; however, using a commercial CFD code to explore ew fluid physics or discover new fluid flow processes or pheomena when properly justified i.e., the limitations of the aproach are well understood by the authors may indeed have arhival value.