Question

The discretization of the transient term using the finite volume approach is more like the spatial discretization of __________

(a) the convection term

(b) the diffusion term

(c) the source term

(d) the anti-diffusion term

The question was asked in a job interview.

This intriguing question comes from Transient Flows in section Transient Flows of Computational Fluid Dynamics

Answer 1

Right answer is (a) the convection term

To explain: The finite volume approach for the discretization of the rate of change per unit time is more similar to the discretization of convection term while doing a spatial discretization. The only difference is that the first case is based on time and the second is based on spatial coordinates.