Abstract

While Continuum Physics may seem old-fashioned in the world of fundamental material science or high-energy physics, simplicity of its approach may still bring benefits. Describing variables as continuous functions of space-time provides a way to overcome up-scaling issues in modelling.

Increasing computing power and established numerical modelling allow us to expand the scope beyond the basics of structural analysis and fluid flow. Flexibility of software implementation is critical. One possible answer is object orientation. OpenFOAM (Field Operation And Manipulation) is an open source object-oriented numerical simulation library aimed at continuum physics modelling and will be described in this seminar.

OpenFOAM handles continuum models by mimicking partial differential equations in software. Polyhedral Finite Volume discretisation is implemented in operator form (e.g. temporal derivatives, gradient, divergence, source and sink terms), and operators are combined to form equations. Efficiency and elegance in implementation is achieved through layered development and extensive code re-use, where various components (e.g. mesh handling, field algebra and calculus, discretisation, linear algebra and solvers, dynamic meshing etc.) are developed and validated in isolation.

Auxiliary tools support the basic solvers, providing pre- and post-processing in- terfaces, dynamic mesh handling, real material properties, massive parallelism, Lagrangian particle model and other tools present in a modern CFD solver. The library is completed with a suite of physical models, covering incompressible, compressible, multi-phase and free surface fluid flow, a suite of 30 RANS and LES turbulence models, combustion, spray and in-cylinder simulations, structural analysis, electromagnetics and fluid-structure interaction.

Today, OpenFOAM is a leading Open Source CFD tool, rapidly expanding in the research community and among industrial users. The talk will be completed with examples of application of OpenFOAM on practical problems.