User Guide Chapter 1 Introduction
This guide accompanies the release of version 1.5 of the Open Source Field Operation and Manipulation (OpenFOAM) C++ libraries. It provides a description of the basic operation of OpenFOAM, first through a set of tutorial exercises in 2 and later by a more detailed description of the individual components that make up OpenFOAM.
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, as described in 3.
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 1.1.
Figure 1.1: Overview of OpenFOAM structure.
