Testing OpenFOAM Computational Fluid Dynamics simulation of heat transfer and fluid flow in a mechanical engineering bachelor degree

Nowadays, countless areas in the domain of mechanical engineering practice can benefit from the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics techniques. Currently, at the Energy branch of the master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Computational Fluid Dynamics is only formally addressed in the first semester of the final year. In many cases, this prevents the students from promptly acquiring the necessary knowledge to embrace a master’s thesis or research project in this field. A possible way to minimise this problem was tested by exposing the students to the Computational Fluid Dynamics world earlier. Thus, in the curricular year 2022/2023, two optional simulation cases with a 35% weight in the final grade of a Heat Transfer course were proposed to the third-year students of the bachelor’s degree.For this purpose, an educational intervention following an action research methodology was implemented. A questionnaire was used to collect students’ feedback. Qualitative grades of the project reports and the discussion sessions corroborated students learning. Considering the students’ grades and that their feedback was in accordance with the complexity of the two simulation cases, we conclude that this education intervention was successful and that Computational Fluid Dynamics can be introduced earlier.