Brian Spalding

Dudley Brian Spalding, FRS FREng (born 9 January 1923) was Professor of Heat Transfer and Head of the Computational Fluid Dynamics Unit at Imperial College, London. He is one of the founders of, and influential persons in, the development of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). In 1983, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Professor Spalding was born at New Malden, Surrey, England. He received his BA degree in Engineering Science from Oxford University in 1944 and PhD from Cambridge University in 1952. He is the founder of the company Concentration Heat And Momentum Limited, (CHAM) specialising in computational fluid dynamics and heat transfer processes. CHAM's major product is the widely used PHOENICS CFD code. Professor Spalding himself is the main creator of, and contributor to, PHOENICS.

Together with his student Suhas Patankar he has developed the SIMPLE algorithm, a widely used numerical procedure to solve the Navier-Stokes equations.

CHAM

Professor Spalding formed Concentration Heat and Momentum (CHAM) Limited in 1974. From the outset commercial CFD services were provided to industrial and governmental clients based on the pioneering technology that had emerged from his research group at Imperial College in the late 1960s. Later these services were based on PHOENICS, the first commercially available Computational Fluid Dynamics Software, which he created and released in 1980.

Between 1969 and 1980, CHAM developed numerous application-specific CFD computer codes for clients across a wide range of sectors, including the aerospace, automotive, defence, chemical, environmental, fire & safety, marine, manufacturing & process, nuclear-power, and fossil-fuel power industries. These CFD codes also provided the means for CHAM to undertake CFD consultancy contracts aimed at solving practical problems and creating design aids for industry. A comprehensive but not exhaustive description of these activities can be found in Artemov et al. [2009]. In this pre-PHOENICS era, contracts typically involved adapting a basic, standard CFD code to a specific application for a particular client. These two- and three-dimensional standard codes either handled parabolic systems, partially parabolic systems, or fully elliptic systems with the option for steady or time-dependent simulations.

In 1978, Professor Spalding conceived the idea of a single CFD code capable of handling all fluid-flow processes. Consequently, CHAM abandoned the policy of developing individual application-specific CFD codes, and during late 1978 the company began creating the world’s first general-purpose CFD code, PHOENICS, which is an acronym for Parabolic, Hyperbolic Or Elliptic Numerical Integration Code Series. The initial creation of PHOENICS was largely the work of Professor Spalding and Harvey Rosten, and the code was launched commercially in 1981, and so here for the first time, a single CFD code was to be used for all thermo-fluids problems.

Selected books

• B. E. Launder and D. B. Spalding, Mathematical Models of Turbulence, Academic Press (1972).
• D. B. Spalding and E. H. Cole, Engineering Thermodynamics, 3rd ed., Hodder Arnold (1973).
• D. B. Spalding, Combustion and Mass Transfer, Elsevier (1978).

Honours and awards

• Max Jakob Memorial Award, 1978
• Fellowship of the Royal Society, 1983
• Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering, 1989
• Global Energy Prize, 2009
• Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering of The Franklin Institute, 2010