Optimizing computational fluid dynamic models to reduce simulation runtime

Optimizing the runtime in computational modeling of systems can save valuable time and resources. Long runtimes lead to significantly higher mistake costs, and limit how involved undergraduate students can be in research. This work has investigated the effect of variable mesh element sizes and simulation space size on the runtime and accuracy of in computational models, and found that both can have significant impact. The work has investigated how large the mesh element sizes can be while still producing accurate results. The larger mesh sizes in a model lead to a fewer number of elements, which lead to shorter runtimes. Additionally, we investigated how large a simulation space needs to be in order to produce accurate results as well. Again, minimizing the simulation space can also lead to fewer computational data points which leads to shorter runtimes as well. Here we report the impact of these types of factors on a simple finite element method computational fluid dynamics simulation.