Method of operator splitting or fractional steps and its applications to fluid-dynamic modelling

The basic method of operator splitting or the fractional step method is explained in tutorial fashion. Simple applications are given to illustrate the versatility of the method. The applications are representations of the type of terms which could be encountered in complicated fluid dynamic problems, notably, the equations of chemically reacting flow or multiphase flow. While these methods are applicable to current modelling efforts on current generation SISD (single instruction stream, single data stream) computers, they appear to have a potentially greater application on vector SIMD (single instruction stream, multiple instruction stream) computers and parallel processor MIMD (multiple instruction stream, multiple data stream) computers.