Welcome to the Homepage of Virtual Flow Lab (VFL)

VFL is a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software. It is designed to be used as a supplementary teaching aid for the students and instructors of undergraduate and graduate level CFD courses. Students can create and solve their own flow problems. Instructors can create problem templates with it and assign homework to study the effect of different solution parameters such as discretization scheme or mesh quality on the accuracy and the efficiency of the solution.


Main features of VFL are

• It is capable of solving two-dimensional, incompressible, laminar, steady and unsteady flows.
• It uses a pressure-based finite volume solver with the SIMPLE family of discretization schemes.
• Convective terms of the Navier-Stokes equations can be discretized using one of the Central, Upwind, Power Law or Hybrid schemes.
• It has a graphical user interface with built-in Cartesian mesh generator, convergence monitor and post-processor.
• Although VFL does not support body-fitted grids, it is still possible to solve quite interesting flow fields using staircase grids coupled with Patankar's block-off region idea.
• VFL is an open source software with freely available source code. It is tested on Windows and Linux platforms.

To get a better feeling of what VFL can offer to you, please visit the Screenshots and Movies page. If you are interested in the theory behind the solution techniques used in VFL, you can find more information and a reference list at the Theory section. If you want to give VFL a try you can find precompiled executables and the source files at the Download page.


VFL is created at the Mechanical Engineering Department of Middle East Technical University by Dr. Cüneyt Sert and Güneş Nakiboğlu.