General Introduction

Abstract

At the present time the majority of unsolved problems in Fluid Dynamics are governed by non-linear partial differential equations and can only be treated by a numerical approach. As a consequence, specialists in Fluid Dynamics have recently devoted increasing attention to numerical, as opposed to analytical, techniques. Of course, there is no point in developing a novel numerical method unless it can be applied to actual problems of interest. In the early days of research on numerical analysis the capacity of computing machines was too restricted to permit many applications to be carried out. Today this situation has changed; the machines now available are sufficiently advanced to deal with an almost limitless range of problems; all that is needed is to discover effective numerical methods to attack them.