Guest editorial

Citation

Bennacer, R. (2007), "Guest editorial", International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow, Vol. 17 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/hff.2007.13417caa.001

Guest editorial

The special issue of the International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow (IJNMHFF) brings together selected papers from the International Conference on Computational Heat and Mass Transfer held in Paris 17-20 May 2005 (ICCHMT 05). The conference covers a relative broad spectrum of topics, ranging from applied mathematics and computational analysis to various applications and design optimization. It is a rapidly evolving research field, as well as an irreplaceable design tool in modern engineering practice.

We would like to express our gratitude to the IJNMHFF Editor, Professor Roland W. Lewis, for dedicating a special issue of this journal to high quality papers presented in the ICCHMT 05 conference. The contributions were selected from the 300 presented papers.

The objective of the meeting was to address the state-of-the-art on the CFD-CHMT interaction in several domains involving developers of model, tools, and to focus on some specific applications. Much work is devoted to complex systems and coupled heat and mass transfer, the latter also including air quality and pollutant transport. We note also a new point of interest centred on microfluidic and on molecular and lattice Boltzmann methods with applications related to various scales.

The computational fluid dynamic and the computational heat transfer dealing with the transport phenomena appeared to be in exponential growth. The complex local treatment is supported by huge computer power ability. In the near future, the continuous modelling from local to global size will be possible by using heterogeneous and hybrid approach (coupling: finite volumes, finite elements, boundary elements, spectral, Lattice-Boltzmann, molecular dynamic).

Such processes involving fluid flow, heat and mass transport are encountered in very diverse fields, such as chemistry, biomedical, biochemistry, engineering, botany, geology, and medicine. Specific practical examples of engineering interest abound, including metallurgical process, powder and drug delivery systems, chemical reactors, filters, leaf transpiration and cropping, nuclear waste disposal, underground pollutant transport, oil/gas recovery, building insulation, alveolar respiration and capillary circulation among many others.

The several process are involved as the major phenomena by those studying transport phenomena in materials, the vastness of the applicative field is also a weakness for hindering the development of uniform community, theories and standards.

The state-of-the-art, trends and perspectives in the few fields are overviewed by the selected papers, presented by internationally recognized research groups.

The present issue is dedicated to complex coupled no-linear problem dealing with the microscales (papers by Alexeev et al. and Timchenko et al.) where the natural convection, and the mixed convection and the surface tension effects control and impose the resulting heat and mass transfer and the flow structure. The dynamic behaviour remains one of the challenges in the flow stability treatment and moving interface (as presented in the papers by Benim et al., Carcadea et al. and Han et al.). It is followed by particular studies dealing with the humidity or compressibility (papers by Pons and Le Quéré and by Azizi et al.) which are generally considered as minor effects and neglected in heat and/or mass transfer. It is pointed out that under these specific conditions, such effects modify the obtained results.

We hope that the volume provides an overview of the state-of-the-art of chosen topics in heat and mass transfer and will thus serve to many readers from academic and industrial communities as an up-to-date source of information, as well as a useful resource for further research.

Rachid BennacerGuest Editor