Teaching Computational Fluid Mechanics Over The Internet

New Mexico State University's Mechanical Engineering Department provides a distance education Master of Science degree program for Boeing Aircraft Company. As part of this program, students were o ered a trial version of a computational uid mechanics course over the internet. The Summer Session and Fall 2000 Semester inaugurated this course under a special projects designation. Lecture notes on computational methods for uid mechanics were provided on the course web site for the students to download. They also were given access to the video streamed lectures of a separate intermediate uid mechanics course by the same instructor. Concurrent with viewing lectures and lecture notes, the students familiarized themselves with a sophisticated uid mechanics computer package, called CFX provided by AEA, Inc., housed on the NMSU-ME computer system. This was accomplished by working through a series of 10 fairly complicated tutorials which treated a range of problems from laminar, incompressible ows through compressible, turbulent ows. The grade for the course was based upon homework, the CFX tutorial results and a nal course project using CFX. Homework assignments provided on the course web site could be returned by the students to the instructor either electronically or by FAX. Since the CFX package was run remotely by the students, the tutorial and the project could be monitored continuously by the instructor who had access to the student's les. The CFX project required the students to do a diÆcult compressible, turbulent uids problem completely on their own. This included creating the ow geometry, meshing of the ow eld, setting up the boundary and initial conditions, and solving the problem on a parallel Unix machine. Graded output consisted of the geometry le, the mesh, the results le and a multitude of color plots which included temperature and pressure contour plots, velocity contour plots, velocity vector plots, and streamline plots. Our initial o ering of Computational Fluid Mechanics over the internet was not without diÆculties, mainly with equipment and software. Despite these diÆculties, the students at Boeing performed just as well as our students on the NMSU campus who have taken this course in the past, but with 'live' lectures and direct access to the computers. We feel this course should now become a regular part of our distance education program at the Master of Science level.