Computational challenges of viscous incompressible flows

Over the past 30 years, numerical methods and simulation tools for incompressible flows have been advanced as a subset of the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) discipline. Although incompressible flows are encountered in many areas of engineering, simulation of compressible flow has been the major driver for developing computational algorithms and tools. This is probably due to the rather stringent requirements for predicting aerodynamic performance characteristics of flight vehicles, while flow devices involving low-speed or incompressible flow could be reasonably well designed without resorting to accurate numerical simulations. As flow devices are required to be more sophisticated and highly efficient, CFD tools become increasingly important in fluid engineering for incompressible and low-speed flow. This paper reviews some of the successes made possible by advances in computational technologies during the same period, and discusses some of the current challenges faced in computing incompressible flows.