Did you learn CFD in college/university?

[Vadar2012]

I found a couple decent ones I somehow have with me at work:

ShockWave/Transitional Boundary-Layer Interactions in Hypersonic Flow
R. Benay, B. Chanetz, B. Mangin, and L. Vandomme
AIAA JOURNAL
Vol. 44, No. 6, June 2006

Separation length in high-enthalpy shock boundary-layer interaction
Jean-Paul Davisa and Bradford Sturtevant
Graduate Aeronautical Laboratories, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125

The first one is especially good. I spent a year replicating its experiment and CFD results using a new NASA program. I was able to get much better CFD results, which allowed me to explain the weird stuff they were seeing in the experiment. It's also good for comparing newly compiled CFd program results to for verification.

 

[Vadar2012]

Hi Astronuc,

What you said in regards to students nowadays not developing the numerical methods from scratch, is not entirely true. I am currently taking an introduction FEA course where the professor teaches us all the theory and background that programs like ANSYS and pro/e use. All of this while introducing us to ANSYS. In fact, one of our homeworks is to write a program that solves one and two dimensional structural mechanics problems. I'm still in the process of writing it.

Although it might just be our professor, he is very old fashioned.

I just wanted to add some stuff to this. You learn pretty much nothing in these classes. I've done a class at uni (multiple) that say they teach you the background and how they work, but if you do any research in this field. You'll see they don't teach you anything in comparison.

 

[boneh3ad]

Addressing the idea of validating computations with experiments, this is a practice that is done constantly in the scientific community. In fact, in general a CFD solution can never be truly validated without either a direct comparison with either an analytical solution (very, very rare) or experiments. Naturally, experiments are the typical route here when possible.

Lately, Physics of Fluids has had a lot of work on Rayleigh-Bénard convection. Just browse through recent issues of that and you ought to find a pretty nice chunk of work which will, of course, reference other, more canonical works in the field.
http://pof.aip.org/search?key=PHFLE6&societykey=AIP&coden=PHFLE6&q=Rayleigh-B%C3%A9nard&displayid=AIP&sortby=newestdate&faceted=faceted&sortby=newestdate&CP_Style=false&alias=&searchzone=2

The thing about that particular phenomenon is that, at least today, there is not going to be a lot of experimental data on simple Rayleigh-Bénard convection because it is already a well-studied problem and in many cases it has an analytical solution for the interesting bits of the phenomenon such as the hydrodynamic stability. You may have better luck finding data for variations of the traditional Rayleigh-Bénard problem.

The other thing to keep in mind is that quite often, you will see a numerical work in a separate paper from its experimental counterpart, especially because oftentimes one inspires the other.

I will also add that during my undergrad, FEA and CFD courses were offered by my university as electives that attempted to do a mix of the background theory (e.g. Galerkin methods) while also providing familiarity with various software (generally ANSYS and Fluent). Of course it is a class so, as Vadar2012 pointed out, it will still never quite be the same as what you learn from reading a couple papers and then doing it. Then again, most undergraduates don't have that opportunity so the class is at least a good start.