The OpenFOAM (Open Field Operation and Manipulation) CFD toolbox can simulate anything from complex fluid flows involving chemical reactions, turbulence, and heat transfer, to solid dynamics, electromagnetics, and the pricing of financial options. It uses finite volume numerics to solve systems of partial differential equations ascribed on any 3D unstructured mesh of polyhedral cells. The fluid flow solvers are developed within a robust, implicit, pressure-velocity, iterative solution framework, although alternative techniques are applied to other continuum mechanics solvers.
| Tags | Scientific/Engineering Mathematics Visualization Software Development Libraries |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPL |
| Operating Systems | Windows POSIX Unix |
| Implementation | C C++ |
Recent releases


Release Notes: This release adds minor enhancements and bugfixes.


Release Notes: This release adds a completely new, fully-parallelized implementation of the arbitrary mesh interface, a new solver for two compressible fluid phases where one phase is dispersed, a new Euler-Euler solver which can simulate any number of incompressible phases which may be dispersed or "VoF"-resolved, an incompressible Navier-Stokes solver which approximates waves through a wave height field, and a turbulence model which can simulate flow with a boundary layer which undergoes a transition from laminar to turbulent flow.


Release Notes: Numerous enhancements were made. Support for newer GCC compilers was fixed.


Release Notes: Numerous new applications were added for multiphase flow and cavitation, buoyancy-flow and heat transfer, high speed flows, and molecular dynamics. A new meshing utility was added, which generates split-hex meshes from surface geometry and provides insertion of cell layers, flexible mesh refinement, and robust surface handling. Several new additions were made to model libraries, including radiation modelling, rotating frame of reference, Lagrangian particle tracking, molecular dynamics, and a mesh motion solver for flexible mesh scaling.


Release Notes: The program now uses OpenMPI by default. Converters support translation from Fluent format to OpenFOAM, and from OpenFOAM into a generic user-specified format. New solvers have been added for incompressible Newtonian fluids, with either turbulent or laminar flows, and new turbulence models for compressible flows. Mesh motion solvers have been extended to include displacement as well as velocity. A scheme was added to remove high frequency modes with ‘staggering’ characteristics. Parallel compilation has improved. The program shows a speedup on the Itanium2 processor, and support for asymmetric matrices was improved.