Particle Tracking In previous versions of OpenFOAM, patch injection models would inject new parcels at locations between the centres of the boundary face and near-wall cells, leading to a parcel distribution with an ordered structure which would persist for some time unless dispersion was applied. In v2.3.0, particles injected at patches are randomly distributed across […]

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 baffles has been simplified considerably […]

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 quality can often degrade under […]

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$FOAM_SOLVERS/lagrangian/DPMFoam Example Goldschmidt experimental case$FOAM_TUTORIALS/lagrangian/DPMFoam/Goldschmidt Particle Drag Modelling The […]

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 of OpenFOAM and subsequently extended […]

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 perhaps with different addressing, e.g. […]

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 condition. In previous versions of […]

In the latest release we have introduced enhanced documentation of OpenFOAM within the HTML source documentation generated using Doxygen. The new feature uses extended file headers in which documentation is written and processed into pages by Doxygen. Access to Doxygen Modules Doxygen modules provide a convenient interface to grouped information, accessible via the Modules tab […]

Function Objects OpenFOAM can carry out post-processing automatically while the simulation is running using function objects. In v2.2.0, the range of available functionality has been extended to include the following. All function object data is now output to a postProcessing directory in the case directory. new wallShearStress – calculates the wall shear stress for incompressible […]

Jump Boundary Conditions A new jump condition framework has been implemented that allows jump conditions to be applied to any field variable across matching cyclic and non-matching cyclicAMI patches. The jump can be specified as either fixedJump, fixedJumpAMI: a spatially varying jump field, fixed in time, or uniformJump, uniformJumpAMI: a uniform jump value in space […]