A Brief Introduction to CFD Using OpenFOAM

Here we are going to start looking at OpenFOAM which is open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. We can use OpenFOAM to solve CFD problems involving heat and mass transfer, flows involving turbulence and complex geometry, moving objects and much more.

The fact that OpenFOAM is open-source means that it’s freely available for all to use. It’s a great place to start with CFD since you don’t need to pay anything. This is a huge advantage of OpenFOAM over commercial CFD packages. These typically start out costing thousands of dollars for a single user. Being open-source also means that all the code is available for anyone to see, edit or change. As a result, there is a great community for OpenFOAM. Now it does have a slightly steeper learning curve associated with it however this is secretly an upside since it forces you to learn, develop skills and improve knowledge across many fields.

A potential downside is that OpenFOAM runs on Linux operating systems. Most people nowadays are familiar with Windows operating systems, but since OpenFOAM was built to be open-source, it only made sense to build it on an open-source operating system – Linux. Most people are unfamiliar with Linux based operating systems like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Manjaro (the list goes on…). This adds to the complexity since you’re not just learning a new piece of software, but also a new operating system. This is another secret upside since it allows you to expand your knowledge, this time into different operating systems.

OpenFOAM is an excellent piece of free software that anyone can use for CFD problems. Through this series of posts, we will touch on many aspects regarding CFD, programming, data processing and Linux based operating systems. You will definitely have a deeper understanding of all of these after using OpenFOAM.

There is no way we could cover all of what OpenFOAM does – it is simply too vast, and new features and functionality are added all the time. It is best to start with simple problems before moving on to more complicated ones. As this blog is mostly dedicated to heat transfer, we will limit our use mainly to this field. Still, there are many great opportunities for discovery here. So let’s dive in!

Disclaimer: Qdot Systems is in no way associated with ESI-OpenCFD Ltd or The OpenFOAM Foundation.