Curriculum::Courses

Introductory, Cross-Disciplinary Courses:

• XD-I
  To be listed in LSU's Spring 2006 Course Catalog as ME7953 and X-listed as PHYS7233, MATH7999-n, PETE7241.
  Description: An introduction to fluid dynamics from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The first half of the course will emphasize how the principal concepts that underpin our understanding of fluid flows apply to a wide range of physical scales; the second half of the course will take the form of four separate, discipline-specific modules. Physical concepts initially will be presented without mathematics, using examples drawn from various disciplines. Then, the physical concepts will be expressed in mathematical terms to make them tangible for the solution of numerous problems. Example problems initially will be introduced on the simplest of levels and will be chosen so that they can be expanded upon and brought to a higher level (in terms of both formulation and solution method) during the second half of the course. The focus will be on problems with analytical or semi-analytical solutions, but close coordination with XD-II will allow extension to numerical solutions.
  [For a more detailed syllabus, click here.]
  
• XD-II
  To be listed in LSU's Spring 2006 Course Catalog as ME7823 ; and X-listed as CSC7999, MATH7999-m, PETE7242.
  Description: An introduction to computational methods that are employed across multiple disciplines to model complex fluid flows on a wide variety of scales. Topics to be covered include: Interpolation; numerical integration & differentiation; solution of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and partial differential equations (PDEs). Techniques for solving PDEs of elliptic, parabolic, & hyperbolic form will be introduced with fluid-flow examples. Finite-difference (FDM), finite-volume (FVM), and finite-element (FEM) methods will be introduced along with computational frameworks that facilitate parallelization and access to GRID computing resources.
  [For a more detailed syllabus, click here.]