ChENGINEER SPACE

The Open­FOAM (Open Field Oper­a­tion and Manip­u­la­tion) is an open source CFD tool­box pro­duced by OpenCFD Ltd from UK. It can sim­u­late any­thing from com­plex fluid flows involv­ing chem­i­cal reac­tions, tur­bu­lence and heat trans­fer, to solid dynam­ics, elec­tro­mag­net­ics and the pric­ing of finan­cial options.

The core tech­nol­ogy of Open­FOAM is a flex­i­ble set of effi­cient C++ mod­ules. These are used to build a wealth of: solvers, to sim­u­late spe­cific prob­lems in engi­neer­ing mechan­ics; util­i­ties, to per­form pre– and post-processing tasks rang­ing from sim­ple data manip­u­la­tions to visu­al­i­sa­tion and mesh pro­cess­ing; libraries, to cre­ate tool­boxes that are acces­si­ble to the solvers/utilities, such as libraries of phys­i­cal models.

An exten­sive set of Open­FOAM solvers has evolved (and is for­ever grow­ing) that are avail­able to users. Below is the list of solvers available:

• Basic CFD
• Incom­press­ible, com­press­ible, and mul­ti­phase flows
• Direct numer­i­cal sim­u­la­tion (DNS) and large eddy sim­u­la­tion (LES)
• Com­bus­tion
• Heat trans­fer and buoyancy-driven flows
• Particle-tracking flows
• Mol­e­c­u­lar dynam­ics methods
• Elec­tro­mag­net­ics
• Stress analy­sis of solids
• Finance

OpenCFD devel­ops Open­FOAM in the Linux/UNIX oper­at­ing sys­tem because they believe it is the best plat­form for this kind of high end sim­u­la­tion code devel­op­ment and oper­a­tion. How­ever Open­FOAM is open source soft­ware so peo­ple can freely com­pile it on any oper­at­ing sys­tem they choose. Most users are run­ning Linux, so offi­cially it is offered the down­load of bina­ries for selected Linux sys­tems (32/64bits).

If you are a Win­dows user and you have never used Linux before I have a per­sonal tip. You should test Open­FOAM by means of a Linux LiveDVD. A liveDVD is DVD con­tain­ing a bootable com­puter oper­at­ing sys­tem. Specif­i­cally there is a spe­cial dis­tri­b­u­tion of Linux ded­i­cated to com­puter aided engi­neer­ing: CAELinux. So that you can down­load the image file (.ISO) of last release to your sys­tem (32/64bits) and burn it in a DVD. After you must boot your com­puter start­ing from the DVD rather than from the hard drive. CAELinux comes with Open­FOAM installed by default (see Fea­tures sec­tion). Once liveDVD has many video tuto­ri­als to instruc­tion it becomes easy get­ting start OpenFOAM.

Project web­site:

• http://www.opencfd.co.uk/openfoam
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/openfoam-mswin (Unof­fi­cial release for Windows)

Screen­shots:

Par­aView interface

Video sam­ple:

• High Reynolds num­ber flow over cir­cu­lar cylinder

• Slosh6DOF: OpenFoam-1.5 tutorial