RECENT APPLICATIONS OF INTEGRAL METHODS IN FLUID-MECHANICS AND HEAT-TRANSFER

Integral methods, conventionally applied to parabolic flows, exploit similitudes of flow variables in a direction which is normal to the principal flow direction, reduce the order of the governing differential equations, and facilitate simple numerical or analytical solutions. In today's environment of powerful computing hardware, integral techniques are generally ignored in favour of numerical solutions of the full set of partial differential equations, including increasingly sophisticated turbulence models. However, by reviewing several recent applications of the integral approach by the author, this paper illustrates that the method can still prove to be versatile and cost-effective and, furthermore, it shows that it is the construction of a mathematical model of the physical reality which can be more difficult than the strategy for obtaining solutions to that model.