CFD Computer Simulation Consultant
Center for Computational Fluid Dynamics
CFD Computer Simulation Consultant
Dena Hendriana, Sc.D
dena.hendriana@sgu.ac.id
dhendria@gmail.com
HP: +(62) 812 1371 5844
(WA message or Call)
www.CenterForCFD.com
Address:
Alam Sutera
Tangerang 15143
Banten - Indonesia
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alumni
Research Center @ Tangerang, Indonesia
CFD Software: OpenFOAM
Center for Computational Fluid Dynamics is using the OpenFOAM software to do CFD analysis. OpenFOAM software is an open source developed and tested by CFD community all around the world and it has been around since 2004.
OpenFOAM (for "Open-source Field Operation And Manipulation") is a C++ toolbox for the development of customized numerical solvers, and pre-/post-processing utilities for the solution of continuum mechanics problems, most prominently including computational fluid dynamics (CFD).
OpenFOAM is first and foremost a C++ library, used primarily to create executables, known as applications. The applications fall into two categories: solvers, that are each designed to solve a specific problem in continuum mechanics; and utilities, that are designed to perform tasks that involve data manipulation. The OpenFOAM distribution contains numerous solvers and utilities covering a wide range of problems.
One of the strengths of OpenFOAM is that new solvers and utilities can be created by its users with some pre-requisite knowledge of the underlying method, physics and programming techniques involved.
OpenFOAM is supplied with pre- and post-processing environments. The interface to the pre- and post-processing are themselves OpenFOAM utilities, thereby ensuring consistent data handling across all environments. The overall structure of OpenFOAM is shown in the Figure below.
The most useful pre-processing tool in OpenFOAM is SnappyHexMesh. It is a mesh generator that takes an already existing mesh (usually created with blockMesh) and chisels it into the mesh you want. But for this, it requires:
- A very well defined dictionary, namely system/snappyHexMeshDict.
- Good geometrical definitions, such as:
- STL/OBJ files with well defined surfaces;
- eMesh feature edge files, that define feature edges that have describe sharp corners.
ParaView is very powerful post-processing tool in OpenFOAM. It is an open-source multiple-platform application for interactive, scientific visualization. It has a client-server architecture to facilitate remote visualization of datasets, and generates level of detail (LOD) models to maintain interactive frame rates for large datasets. It is an application built on top of the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) libraries. ParaView is an application designed for data parallelism on shared-memory or distributed-memory multicomputers and clusters. It can also be run as a single-computer application.
Advantages:
- Friendly syntax for partial differential equations.
- Fully documented source code.
- Unstructured polyhedral grid capabilities.
- Automatic parallelization of applications written using OpenFOAM high-level syntax.
- Wide range of applications and models ready to use.
- Commercial support and training provided by the developers.
- No license costs.
Disadvantages:
- The development community suffers from fragmentation, giving rise to numerous forked projects.
- Absence of an integrated graphical user interface (stand-alone open-source and proprietary options are available).
- The Programmer's guide does not provide sufficient details, making the progress slow if you need to write new applications or add functionality.
For more information on OpenFOAM, you can visit www.openfoam.org