CFL3D: Its history and some recent applications

The CFL3D (Computational Fluids Laboratory- 3D) computer code is a result of the close working relationship between computational fluid dynamicists at the NASA Langley Research Center and visiting scientists to the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineer-ing (ICASE) at the same location. In the early 1980's, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was still an emerging field. By bringing together many of the leading scientists in numerical methods to work with each other, NASA and ICASE enabled the crystallization of many new ideas and methods for CFD. The initial spark for the CFL3D code was the application of the flux-vector splitting (FVS) monotone upstream-centered scheme for conservation laws (MUSCL) idea of van Leer 1'2 to an implicit finite-volume code for the solution of the three-dimensional (3d) compressible Euler equations. Many of van Leer's ideas were inspired by the pioneering work of Godunov, 3 who con-sidered the fluid to be divided into slabs and determined the interaction of these slabs at their interface. The team of Thomas, Anderson, Waiters, and van Leer 4'5 explored several implicit solu-tion strategies using FVS, particularly with regard to application on recently-developed vector-processor computers. Also, FVS was compared with other flux-splitting techniques, and variou