Can Deal.II be used for CFD

[Heriberto Saldívar Massimi]

Hello, 

I know that deal.ll is made for finite element, but can it be also used for finite volume or if not, do you recomend a library that works like that?

Thanks!

[Timo Heister]

deal.II supports continuous and DG finite elements but is not a finite
volume library. There are many people using deal.II for CFD though.
Discontinuous Galerkin can be seen as a generalization of finite
volumes to higher order. Some things we can not do is arbitrary types
of cells (pyramids, prisms, etc.), which are often used in industrial
CFD applications.
Most applications use deal.II with implicit time discretization and
that is what a lot of the features are tailored to. So if you are
looking to do finite volume, explicit time stepping for turbulent flow
around an airplane, deal.II might not be your method of choice.

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Timo Heister
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~heister/

[Scott Miller]

Dear Heriberto,

No, in general, deal.II cannot be used for finite volume.  If one chooses piece-wise constant discontinuous Galerkin elements, you can recover certain cell-centered FVMs.  One problem is that only nearest neighbor information is available, so extending your stencil for higher-order flux or limiter computations is not easy/possible.

Have you looked at cfd-online for suggestions?  Their forums may be the place to go for more detailed advice.

http://www.cfd-online.com/Links/soft.html

Best

-Scott

[Heriberto Saldívar Massimi]

Dear Timo and Scott!

Thanks for your help. 

I assumed that it wouldnt be useful, but I just wanted to be sure!

Thanks!

[Wolfgang Bangerth]

Heriberto,

> I know that deal.ll is made for finite element, but can it be also used for
> finite volume or if not, do you recomend a library that works like that?

Finite volumes are just a special kind of finite elements, primarily a
variation of discontinuous Galerkin methods. People have solved all sorts of
hyperbolic flow problems with this approach, take for example a look at the
papers by Ralf Hartmann referenced in the list of publications. There is also
an example program using this approach.

Of course, there are also flow problems described by the Stokes and
Navier-Stokes equations and there the finite element method is widely used.
There are multiple example programs in this area.

Best
Wolfgang

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wolfgang Bangerth email: bang...@math.tamu.edu
www: http://www.math.tamu.edu/~bangerth/