See the improvements to the user experience and the new features added.
The Open-Source Field Operation and Manipulation software more commonly called OpenFOAM started as a free tool for computational flow dynamics in December 2004. Since that time the software ran through a series of updates based on internal improvements and user requests. The OpenFOAM v2106 update is now here with a wide array of new functions and improvements.
OpenFOAM bills itself as a C++ library used to create applications. The applications are split into utilities and solvers. The solvers are more straightforward and are used to work through equations while the utilities manipulate data. The tool’s structure is split into pre-processing, solving and post-processing. The pre-processing focuses on the meshing, solving deals with applications both standard and user-defined, and the post-processing uses ParaView and other viewers to show the results.
Pre-processing Gets Mesh Upgrades, Post-processing Has New Functions
The company says that changes made in v2106 come from a combination of customer sponsored projects, internally funded initiatives and changes that came from the OpenFOAM community. Pre-processing has several improvements to the existing utilities. The snappyhexmesh function now allows users to look at mesh areas and decide where a refined mesh should be applied while taking refined meshing out of areas where it’s not needed. The splitmeshregions command gets some syntax changes to name callouts and now allows users to add wildcard labels. Meshing for the extrudemodel function now supports Catmull-Rom splines, specifically when defining vertices and edges. Several other utilities are now able to call out their region of focus so a user can choose a single region, every region or call out specific regions.
Post-processing also has changes and additions. The new multiFieldView object lets a user apply one function to several objects as a batch process. Commands inside the object let the user add or subtract values and display a maximum, minimum and average. MultiRegion is another new object that lets users apply the same display conditions to several regions to give a consistent presentation. Three new cloud calculation objects are added to calculate Reynolds number, Nusselt number and heat transfer coefficients. Improvements were also made to the dynamic mode decomposition, distance surface filters, and data conversion areas of the post processor.
In the solver area even more changes have been implemented. The solar load model lets the user give time dependent input to a model. Fixes aimed at the turbulenceFields command now give more accurate results and calculations, based on user feedback that the Spalart-Allaras models would show zero for outputs in the previous software release.
Documentation and Training
OpenFOAM continues its commitment to user education and training with this release. The tutorial guide gives the user a taste for basic definitions and functions and shows case-specific examples for compressible flow, incompressible flow, multiphase flow and stress analysis. If customers want a more formal training, several courses are offered that range from basic familiarity to deep diving classes specific to an application. In general, the documentation and update notes are dense, with incredibly specific user cases and examples that feel like the developments were made for individual applications.
The v2106 release shows a commitment to OpenFOAM’s customer base and the idea that the libraries will be used and updated into the future. Open-source code and support is available through Linux, Windows Subsystem for Linux and MacOSX using dockers or pre-compiled packages.
