Last week I had the opportunity to meet some great people doing excellent work in open source CFD. Our hosts at the University of Zagreb were extremely welcoming, and I had a great time getting to know the students and researchers attending the workshop.
OpenFOAM is a package of many different solvers that are being actively developed by the community. The code has an impressive number of solvers that allow users the flexibility to simulate systems ranging from full car aerodynamics to ship hydrodynamics with a free surface to diffusion of cryogenic helium.
The workshop covered a wide range of topics including solver development, applications, and training, but of most interest to us at Pointwise were the discussions about grids and preprocessing for OpenFOAM. I was fortunate enough to present some work I have been doing in OpenFOAM to study grid effects on solution accuracy by considering embarrassingly simple test cases in order to isolate specific grid-related effects. Despite their apparent simplicity, deciphering the numerical artifacts in even these reduced cases proved insightful. Since the source for OpenFOAM is visible, it is possible to peek under the hood and discover both why the solution behaves as it does and how to improve it. I put together a short synopsis about some of the work I presented on grid quality in OpenFOAM, and I encourage you to take a look below if you are having difficulties with your meshes/solutions in OpenFOAM. By no means is it an exhaustive document, but I hope that it has a few good pointers that can help you achieve better results.
If you are interested in attending the workshop, next year it will be hosted in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The workshop is a fantastic way to learn more about OpenFOAM and see what others are doing. As always, if you are interested in Pointwise meshes for your applications in OpenFOAM or any other solver, please don’t hesitate to contact us or click below for more information.
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[6th July 2014] Interesting post. I was reading the post sent via email, where the link to the pdf was not correct. The link in the blog post is correct.
Thank you very much for reading! I apologize for the broken link. There was a small issue with the original attachment that required me to update the file. The link in the email must have broken when I did that. I am glad you were able to find the document through the website and thank you for letting us know.