User:Hoogs/Presentation/What is OpenFOAM

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< User:Hoogs‎ | Presentation
Revision as of 23:30, 17 September 2009 by Hoogs (Talk | contribs)

  • OpenFOAM started as a Fortran project at Imperial College, London in the mid 1990's
    • Fortran proved unwieldy
    • Henry Weller recognised value in the new C++ language, adapted the code and published the first paper outlining the new approach
      • Thought to be the first major scientific application package developed in C++
    • What emerged was FOAM (Field Operation And Manipulation)
    • Henry and Hrvoje Jasak set up a company and attracted some interest in package sales but it was difficult competing with marketing-driven incumbents like Fluent
    • The name was changed to OpenFOAM
    • Henry established OpenCFD to provide consulting services that fund continued development
      • OpenCFD continues to grow (currently half a dozen staff based in Reading, UK)
    • Hrvoje Jasak has a faculty position at the University of Zagreb and consults to CFD companies
  • OpenCFD has since released OpenFOAM versions 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 and the latest, mid-2008 release, 1.5
    • Development more cathedral-like with a relatively small number of trusted contributors outside OpenCFD
    • Benefits greatly from bug and feature feedback of user community, particularly via the forum
  • Release 1.5 dropped the FoamX java gui, introduced snappyHexMesh for automated hex mesh creation, added an extensive lagrangian particle tracking library and made simplifications to interfaces for command line applications and utilities, among other things
  • Current OpenCFD development work includes automated polyhedral mesher and scripting via a C++ interpreter
  • OpenFOAM is written in and for Linux because the nix operating systems are much more flexible and powerful for high end computational work
    • There have been Windows ports of older versions (e.g. via cygwin) but no Windows support is planned.
    • Just use linux!... either natively or through a virtual machine such as VirtualBox