HEAT TRANSFER ENGINEERING
, VOL. , NO. , –
http://dx.doi.org/./..IN MEMORIAMProfessor Dudley Brian Spalding –

It is with sadness that we report the death of Professor Brian Spalding FRS FREng after a short illness on 27th November 2016. Brian Spalding was born on 9th January 1923 in New Malden, England. He graduated with a BA and MAin Engineering Science at Oxford University in 1944 and after one year with Shell spent the year 1945-46 with the UK
Rocket Propulsion Establishment in Germany near Braunschweig. In 1948 Brian accepted an ICI Fellowship at Cambridge University to study for a PhD, which he obtained in 1952. The subject of his thesis was the combustion of liquid
fuels and this is where he developed his lifelong interests in fluid flow, combustion and heat and mass transfer. Brian
Spalding joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College as a Reader in Heat Transfer in 1954,
was promoted to Professor of Heat Transfer in 1958 and subsequently also became Head of the Computational Fluid
Dynamics (CFD) Unit. He held both positions until his retirement in 1988. He became a Fellow of the Royal Societyin 1983 and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering 1989. At various times, he has been visiting Professor atMIT, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Minnesota; in the late 1970 s he was Reilly Professorof Combustion at Purdue University.
Brian Spalding was a truly outstanding researcher and teacher who was widely recognized as being one of the leading authorities in his field and who made many important and innovative contributions in a broad range of subjects.
His contributions to science and engineering were wide ranging and ground breaking. For example, his early research,circa 1950, led to a model for evaporating and burning liquid fuel droplets that is still used today. However, his greatest contributions were probably in the area of what is now termed Computational Fluid Dynamics, CFD. In the mid1960 s Brian was amongst the very first to realize that the developing power of the ‘digital’ computer could be used todevise discrete methods for solving the partial differential conservation equations describing fluid motion, combustionand heat and mass transfer. Moreover, the solutions could take into account the myriad complexities of geometry andboundary conditions which would provide engineers with the means to analyze problems in detail far beyond the limited
scope of analytical solutions. Brian and his group devised a suite of computer programs for solving, first the thin-shearlayer equations and then extended them to solve the equations describing recirculating flow, in both two and then threedimensions. Together with Suhas Patankar the so called SIMPLE algorithm was devised to simultaneously determine thepressure and velocity fields. Brian Spalding and the Heat Transfer group revolutionized the analysis of fluids in motion
through computer modeling and he initiated the application of CFD to problems of interest to engineers. He was one of
the most influential persons in the development of CFD, which stimulated the parallel development of ‘mathematicalmodels of turbulence’ and combustion. Indeed, most of today’s commercially available CFD software tools trace their
origins to the work Brian Spalding and his group carried out in the decade spanning the mid-60s and mid-70s.
In 1974 Brian Spalding founded Concentration Heat and Momentum Limited (CHAM), a world-leading consulting
company, which specialized in computer simulation of fluid-flow and heat-transfer processes, with offices in more thanColor versions of one or more of the ﬁgures in this paper can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/uhte.
©  Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

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25 countries. CHAM’s clients continue to use Brian’s pioneering software to obtain computer simulations of fluid flow.
Brian was Chairman and Managing Director of CHAM and, until his death, he was actively engaged in devising models
for combustion, heat and mass transfer and fluid flow and the development CFD software.
Brian was a prolific contributor to education in terms of writing textbooks, organizing short ‘post-experiences’courses and delivering an inspirational MSc course. This attracted students from all over the world to a stimulating
environment and led to many of these pursuing doctoral studies with him.
Brian Spalding’s awards include the Institution of Mechanical Engineers’ James Clayton Prize, the American Societyof Mechanical Engineers’ and the American Institute Chemical Engineers’ Max Jakob Memorial Award, the InstituteFrancais de l’Energie’s Medaille d’Or, the Combustion Institute’s Bernard Lewis Medal, The International Centre for Heatand Mass Transfer’s Luikov Medal, the Global Energy International Prize and the Benjamin Franklin Medal (FranklinInstitute). Brian is survived by his wife Colleen and two sons and a daughter.
Contributed by Professor W. P. Jones
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Imperial College London