Special Issue on Fluids Engineering Research in Honor of the Life and Achievements of Professor Kirti Ghia—A Pioneer in Computational Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

Professor Kirti “Karman” Ghia was an aerospace engineering educator, a research scientist, and a pioneer in the field of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). He passed away on June 13, 2017, at the age of 80. He completed his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. For 47 years he was a faculty member of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Cincinnati (UC), where he founded the Computational Fluid Dynamics Research Laboratory. His pioneering CFD research has provided fundamental solutions for three basic incompressible flow problems: the driven-cavity, the curved-square cross section duct exhibiting Dean's instability, and the backstep geometry. These have served as benchmark solutions for numerous subsequent incompressible flow code developers. His separated-flow work on two-dimensional pitching airfoils led to unmasking the mechanism for a dynamic stall, and a key result from this work was published in the Smithsonian. His co-authored editorial statement on numerical uncertainty became the cornerstone of ASME's policy on numerical uncertainty, and AIAA's current statement has been drafted around that policy. Professor Ghia was very involved with both ASME and AIAA. For the latter, he served as a faculty advisor to the AIAA UC student branch, a member of the AIAA Fluid Dynamics Technical Committee, and an Associate Editor of the AIAA Journal. In ASME, he was very active in the Fluids Engineering Division and served as Chair of the Computational Fluid Dynamics Technical Committee and the Honors and Awards Committee, among several others.