CFL number

I'm working at a University where we are developing and running interface software for CFD simmulations. There are no CFD specialists in my lab, however, so we get the information we need from a couple of other labs around campus.

Unfortunately, no one seems to know what the CFL number is, or how to use it.

Can I just get a simple explanation of the CFL number and a general range in which it should lie?

Thank you! 


Biswajit Banerjee's picture

Re: CFL number

See the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courant%E2%80%93Friedrichs%E2%80%93Lewy_condition

For forward Euler time integration a safe number to use is 0.5 (though higher values may also work).  

-- Biswajit