What is OpenFoam ?

OpenFoam is a freely available open source package, widely used in CFD, facilitating the development of custom open source CFD NWT software for WSI problems, including modeling WEC. OpenFoam includes a large number of models, advanced gridding routines and parallelization options.

OpenFOAM’s broad user base is growing steadily, producing valuable features that complement the official version. Until now, it wasn’t clear how these developments would translate into official releases, benefiting from more users, maintenance, testing, and quality assurance.

OpenFoam capabilities.

OpenFOAM has a wide range of capabilities to simulate everything from turbulence in automotive aerodynamics, to combustion, chemical reactions, heat transfer, liquid sprays, films, and fires and firefighting in buildings. It includes tools for meshing in and around complex geometries, data processing and visualization, and more. To take full advantage of today’s multicore HPC infrastructures, almost all computations can be performed in parallel by default. Some of the available features in OpenFOAM are: Dynamic meshes, Numerical method, Linear system solvers, Parallel computing, etc.

Why OpenFoam ?

It can be easily scripted, so the process can be fully automated. Once the enclosure is set up for the first time, changes in geometry or flow conditions can be quickly tested and compared with previous results. This can effectively optimize a wide variety of problems.

The processing speed is very good, and in combination with parallel programming options offered it can lead to far faster and better results.

Perhaps the most important feature, is that OpenFOAM® is 100% free, enabling this way everyone to have access to it.