Open Source CFD codes

[Rick Ross]

For those who are interested in such things, there is an interesting article about open-source CFD applications in the June issue of Racecar Engineering magazine. An example of this type of application is OpenFOAM, which has been mentioned here in this forum. It is my understanding that OpenFOAM is a very powerful application, but I suspect that considerable user expertise is required in order to obtain useful results.

[nulrich]

It was a good article. OpenFOAM is what we use, which allows us to run CFD on three separate multi-processor computing clusters without paying horrendous license fees. Very powerful software.

Unfortunately, you need a great deal of computer expertise and specialized training to use it effectively. The commercial training classes are almost a necessity, and even then you must be comfortable running under Linux with not much of a user interface. Rob has developed a fair bit of custom software that helps, but, despite 30 years of computer experience (starting with toggle switches, paper tape and punch cards ), I'm not capable of running cases.

And, like all CFD, it is possible to get completely unrealistic results if you don't know what you're doing. Reference the article by Simon McBeath in the same issue!

Nathan