- OpenCFD have recently partnered with SGI to provide training courses
- There is a User Guide which is quite good
- Unfortunately at this time one of the big gaps is an advanced programmer manual
- There is no substitute for playing with tutorial cases and messing with the code
- Learning C++ takes time, but there are plenty of online resources
- Budget about 3-18 months to develop real confidence in C++, depending on how much time you have
- You need to write/modify code regularly to do this
- Understanding the OpenFOAM code arrangement is a separate exercise, and you are mostly on your own if you cannot afford the courses
- Expect this to get easier as the user community grows just through word of mouth
- Things have come a long away even in just the last four years!
- You do not need to compile the code to use it
- But you should anyway, at least once, takes many hours usually (large C++ code bases tend to take longer to compile than C)
- OpenCFD provide pre-compiled binaries tested in SuSE and recently, Ubuntu
- These days any performance improvement due to local compilation rarely noticeable
- OpenFOAM is just the solver
- You need a pre- and post-processor (i.e. mesher and viewer)
- OpenFOAM was designed as an industrial tool so it needed to interface with a wide range of pre and post processors and formats
- Lots of converters in-built where the specifications are publicly available
- Meshing is still "fragmented"
- blockMesh is a native utility for simple geometries, snappyHexMesh new native hex mesher really good but not ideal
- OpenCFD working on a very exciting auto poly mesher
- Paraview serves most purposes, is actually better than say, Fluent post-processor
