Difference between revisions of "User:Hoogs/Presentation/How to use OpenFOAM"

Latest revision as of 11:22, 1 April 2009

• 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 a Programmers Guide but it is incomplete
• 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