Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (p.145-154).This thesis presents FCTHydro, a ROOT package, and its application to hydrodynamic simulations through the packages RelHydro and Nonideal xy. These packages aim to provide the broader heavy ion collision community with access to hydrodynamic simulation software which is now accessible from within the primary analysis framework, ROOT. Tests are performed and show how well the high-order, monotone, conservative, positivity preserving routines within FCTHydro simulate hydrodynamic systems with harsh initial conditions. RelHydro illustrates the application of FCTHydro to relativistic systems and Nonideal xy the application to causal non-ideal hydrodynamic systems. Nonideal xy is also used to obtain a first order understanding of the effects of the relaxation times in causal non-ideal hydrodynamics. In addition, a semi-analytic solution for the particle rapidity spectra obtained by combining Landau hydrodynamics and the Cooper-Frye freezeout formalism is given. The results are compared with the Landau Gaussian and a known approximation for midrapidies. The Landau Gaussian provides the best approximation to experimental data. Furthermore, the chemical freezeout results for preliminary data from AGS for central Au-Au collisions at nominal beam energies 2, 4, 6 and 8 AGeV are shown to agree with the E/N = 1 GeV freezeout criteria. These data allow access to a previously unexplored region in the T-μB phase space
