CFD practitioners and experimentalists have a common goal of understanding aerodynamics. It is therefore surprising that the disciplines often only interact for the validation of CFD. This provides a very limited form of integration but often there is no interaction between the experimentalist and the CFD practitioners. This situation is unsatisfactory from many points of view including (a) the need to have an appreciation of the flow before deciding what should be measured, (b) the desirability of having checks in place on the experimental measurements as they are taken, (c) the difficulty in making certain important measurements, (d) the need to assess the influence of the experimental techniques on the measurements, (e) the ability of CFD to provide detailed flow information and sensitivity at a reasonable cost for some cases, (f) the large cost of CFD calculations for other cases, and (g)the lack of credibility for the CFD results for some flow categories.

It could be argued that the process of aerodynamic investigation would be significantly enhanced if the integration of CFD and experiments was much stronger. In particular, the design and reliability of experiments could be significantly enhanced by CFD, the scope of experimental measurements extended through CFD and the credibility of the simulation results enhanced by the availability of suitable measurements from experiments. This sort of closer integration is however rare. The aim of the symposium is to bring together leading researchers from both fields to initiate more careful consideration of these issues and to stimulate new ways of approaching aerodynamic studies.