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. OpenFOAM is produced by OpenCFD Ltd and is
freely available and open source, licensed under the GNU General Public
Licence.
The core technology of OpenFOAM is a flexible set of efficient C++ modules.
These are used to build a wealth of: solvers, to simulate specific problems in
engineering mechanics; utilities, to perform pre- and post-processing tasks ranging
from simple data manipulations to visualisation and mesh processing; libraries, to
create toolboxes that are accessible to the solvers/utilities, such as libraries of
physical models.
OpenFOAM is supplied with numerous pre-configured solvers, utilities and
libraries and so can be used like any typical simulation package. However,
it is open, not only in terms of source code, but also in its structure
and hierarchical design, so that its solvers, utilities and libraries are fully
extensible.
OpenFOAM 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. Domain decomposition parallelism is fundamental
to the design of OpenFOAM and integrated at a low level so that solvers
can generally be developed without the need for any ’parallel-specific’
coding.
