[.ca] Computational Methods for Fluid Dynamics (ISBN 3540420746)

Only great for complete novices:
Peric's PhD thesis is one of my most precious possessions. I consider Ferziger to be one of THE greats in Large Eddy Simulation. So I had great hopes for this book. I was warned before I saw it that it contained nothing that I wouldn't already know, but even so it was a big disappointment. I could have written a better book myself and I don't have half the brain of either of the authors. I've looked at it three times and each time turned away in disgust. This book will point a novice in the correct direction, unlike Roach's book, and unlike Patankar's in a post Rhie-Chow age, but it avoids like the plague any subject with even the slightest whiff of controversy. As any new technique is always controversial, the book was some 5 to 10 years out of date even before it hit the press. Further, it discusses each subject in a very superficial way. More depth is needed. I want a book that will tell me what the advantages are and how to program the conjugate gradient method, algebraic multigrid, superbee, wall reflection terms for Reynolds Stress, multiphase flow, viscoelasticity, coalescence, the axis in cylindrical coordinates, grid generation, surface tension, adaptive grids, spectral elements etc. This book is no help with any of these. I frequently get asked "What's a good book for Computational Fluid Dynamics?". I have to admit that there isn't one. The best that I know are the user manuals for the various commercial CFD packages. To summarise, if programming CFD is a 100 step journey then this book will only take you the first 3 steps, but at least they're 3 steps in the right direction. After you've been programming CFD for a year you can probably toss the book out without any great loss.

One of the best books for CFD code developers:
This is the best book on CFD I' ve read. It is more useful to those who want to develop their own codes rather than CFD users: It mostly describes in deep detail (although in a concise manner) a single method used by the authors and developed by themselves and their colleagues. It is not intended to be a list of the vast number of CFD techniques developed so far. Their method is state-of-the-art and they provide plenty of results to support it's quality. It is mostly directed towards incompressible flows. They provide a chapter that extends their method to compressible flows but they do not describe any special convection schemes for flows with shock waves. It can be applied to both structured and arbitrarily unstructured grids, although their approach to the discretization of the convection and diffusion terms is particularly useful in the case of arbitrarily unstrucured grids. State of the art subjects such as multigrid and error-driven grid refinement are also covered and integrated into their method. I agree with a previous reviewer that they provide a very good coverage of solution methods for linear equation systems which arise in CFD. Most other books on CFD (all the ones that I have read) have a poor coverage of the subject and describe only old and inneficient methods. However even this book does not sufficiently describe conjugate-gradient type methods or Krylov subspace methods in general, but references are provided. In conclusion, this book is not for beginners but for code developers who have some basic knowlwdge of CFD and a relatively good mathematical background.

I give it 5 stars:
I agree with the reviewer that said this book is complimentary to an intro text such as Patankar. This is not a cook book for a first time coder. But it is a really great reference for the Finite Volume dilettante. I really appreciate that all numerical results presented are thoroughly documented. That counts. Really, really nice chapter on iterative solvers.... Good overall description on many other topics such as multi-grid methods, turbulence, grid geometry and PV coupling. This book really helped me speed up my homegrown quite a bit. They also have all kinds of stuff available by ftp....

Excellent teaching book:
I found this book an excellent support in teaching and invaluable as an occasional reference in my practical work in industry. It is particularly gratifying to see that free surface flows are covered well. Best book I have seen so far in the field.

A lot of excellent detail:
This is a very good book for learning the details of implementing the Finite Volume method in Computational Fluid Dynamics. I view it as very complimentary to S. V. Patankar's book, which is more general in nature. Both books are geared toward people who want to write computer programs to solve fluid transport problems (heat transfer, Navier-Stokes, etc.) Both tend to focus on numerical issues (as opposed to the physics of transport phenomena). But while Pantankar's book provides a very easy, approachable introduction that is thin on the details, Ferziger & Peric have written a book rich in details. For instance, they devote an entire chapter to solving linear systems of equations. They compare all of the commonly used methods and contrast their rates of convergence for various test cases. This level of detail is great if you already understand the big picture. I think it may be somewhat difficult for someone new to CFD to really understand the finite volume method from this book alone. I would recommend Patankar's book for a good intro and this book for the implementation details.