The CFD SINFLOW Project, with the objective of developing an educational package to help the understanding of Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer in disciplines like Computational Fluid Dynamics, is a project that is been developed inside of the Computational Fluid Dynamics Laboratory - SINMEC, since we created the laboratory, in 1986.

Therefore, it is a development that has count with many people's contribution and it is important to give the right credits to each one. In its beginning, in a version in Fortran, we had the collaboration of the Professor Antonio Fábio Carvalho da Silva and of the engineers Sérgio Polina and Axel Dihlmann. The versions in Fortran, without graphic interface and without visualization, the problem was that only the people that worked with the program could execute it. The built-in methodology in the program was always the same, finite volumes in boundary fitted coordinates. The version stayed in this situation for a long time, until approximately 1995. In this time it was decided to write a version for UNIX, with graphic interface and visualization. It was an important jump that received from the student Andrei Kuehnen Silva a fundamental contribution, he had his graduation internship in our laboratory, under my orientation, and he prepared a technical documentation whose still in the current version. This version was already written using COI-lib 1.0, a library for software development, developed in SINMEC, desired for the creation of interfaces as for visualization.

Another important step was given when, already using the COI-lib 2.0, for multi-plataform, we started to develop a new version with new computational abstraction, in C++ object oriented, in this time with the important collaboration of Márcio E. Régis Monteiro and Marcelo Castro of Souza. We also had the collaboration of Clóvis Maliska Jr, who acted in the development of the COI-lib, and in the creation of the computational abstraction in C++ of that version.

But the most important and definitive step to the CFD SINFLOW Project reached the current status was given with by the participation of the Dr. Romeu André Pieritz, Rafael Mendes and Rodrigo Ferraz de Andrade, the first one through recently-doctor at SINMEC, and the others with scholarships in the laboratory, all acting in the development of the current version. They are the responsible for the computational implementation of many contributions of the previous version. For example, the creation of the library CSFL-lib (CFD SINFLOW library), that contains classes and numeric objects, for the creation of computational Fluid Dynamics software. Using the library, the CFD Studio was created, a self-sufficient package, that solves problems of Fluid Dynamics and Heat transfer using the finite volumes and the boundary fitted coordinates methods. The CFD Mesh also was created, this software generates meshes using the elliptic generation equations, and the CFD GridEditor, to edit and to work with the meshes generated in CFD Mesh or meshes generated inside of own CFD Studio.

Many other students had important participation in the documentation of the whole package. Besides the integral participation in the project CFD SINFLOW of Carlos Newmar Donatti and Ewaldo Schubert Júnior, we had the collaboration of Ângelo Cemin Júnior, Diego Alexandre Estivam, Diogo Eduardo Ribeiro, Felipe Melillo Fontan and Gerson Luiz Bridi. We also want to thank all the other members of SINMEC, that by one way or other were involved, mainly the masters degree students, revising documentation and testing the program.

It is also important to thank the ESSS-Engineering Simulation and Scientific Software that today continues the developments of COI-lib 2.0, for having assigned the library and all there modules to develop the CFD Sinflow Project.

The numeric methodology applied in the software is described in chapter 12 of the book, Maliska, C.R. (2004) - "Computational Heat Transfer and Fluid Dynamics", 2nd edition, reviewed and enlarged. Ed. LTC - Technical and Scientific Books.

We hope that the CFD SINFLOW package that includes CSFL-lib, CFD Studio, CFD Mesh and CFD GridEditor help the Fluid Dynamics and Heat transfer teachers, as well as the developer and users of numeric methods. 

Professor Clóvis R. Maliska 
CFD SINFLOW Project Coordinator