Thermal Baffles OpenFOAM can emulate heat transfer across thin solid structures, or “baffles”. Baffles are represented as boundary patches of the mesh and heat transfer is handled either in 3D by the thermalBaffle boundary condition or the equivalent 1D approximation called thermalBaffle1D, described previously. In v2.3.0, the use of thermal […]

Mesh Morphing In previous versions, rigid body motion simulations use one of the generic motion solvers, e.g. displacementSBRStress that solves an elliptic equation for the displacement. These motion solvers suffer from a tendency of cells to shear, and despite various attempts to stiffen cells against shearing particularly near rotating boundaries, mesh […]

Dense Particle Flows OpenFOAM includes the DPMFoam solver which includes the effect of the particulate volume fraction on the continuous phase, suitable for dense particle flow simulation. The solver uses existing functionality for particle clouds and their collisions, which directly resolves particle-particle interactions. Source code DPMFoam solver$FOAM_SOLVERS/lagrangian/DPMFoam Example Goldschmidt experimental […]

Predictor-Corrector Semi-Implicit MULES The success of the volume of fluid (VoF) solvers for multiphase flow in OpenFOAM is underpinned by the development of the multi-dimensionsal limiter for explicit solution (MULES) as a very effective method of guaranteeing boundedness of scalar fields, in particular phase/mass-fractions. MULES was introduced in version 1.4 […]

Field Mapping The mapFields utility has been re-written to enable parallel operation and a mapping mode has been introduced which can be specified using the -mapMethod command line option. The mapping mode can be: direct: the meshes are assumed to be of identical topology, with one-to-one correspondence between cells, but […]

Non-Conforming AMI Patches The arbitrary mesh interface (AMI) was introduced in OpenFOAM v2.1.0 to enable simulation across disconnected, adjacent, mesh domains. It is particularly useful for rotating geometries. Those cases require separate meshes for rotating and/or static regions of geometry, which are coupled at patch boundaries through the cyclicAMI boundary […]

Introduction to foamyHexMesh This version of OpenFOAM includes a new, fully parallelised, meshing tool called foamyHexMesh. It is designed to generate hex-dominant meshes from the same type of surface geometries as used by snappyHexMesh, i.e. triangulated surfaces and in-built analytical surfaces such as spheres, cylinders and planes. The basic principles of […]

Feature Snapping In this release, we have extended existing feature edge handling, reported previously in news and in v2.2.0. Explicit feature snapping uses one or more files containing a description of feature edges in the geometry. snappyHexMesh accepts basic edge mesh file formats, including OpenFOAM’s native .eMesh format, and .obj, […]