Development of Computational Techniques for Transonic Flows: an Historical Perspective

The history of computational fluid dynamics (CFD), especially as driven by the requirements of transonic flow prediction, has been largely coincident with the history of these Symposia. The first Symposium Transsonicum [48], held in Aachen in 1962, was held in the early days of commercial jet aviation at a time of intense interest in the transonic drag rise phenomenon. That first symposium undoubtedly contributed to the growing interest in the development of theoretical (and computational) techniques for predicting transonic flows of practical interest. The analytical papers in the first symposium, however, largely were limited to the hodograph method, although there also were some highly approximate techniques to deal with the essential non-linearity of the transonic problem. Symposium Transsonicum II was held in Göttingen in 1975 [49]. This followed on the heels of the first AIAA CFD Conference [1], held in Palm Springs, California, just two years earlier. Both these conferences were dominated by papers dealing with the numerical solution of the potential equation for transonic flows, often in the small-disturbance approximation. By the time of Symposium Transsonicum III in 1988, [63] also held in Göttingen, the focus of computational work had shifted