A Practical Introduction to OpenFOAM

23 Sep 2019, 09:00 → 24 Sep 2019, 17:00 Africa/Johannesburg

NWU Mahikeng Campus

Andrew Gill (CHPC), Daniel Moeketsi (CHPC)

This workshop is aimed at postgraduate engineering, physics or applied mathematics student, researchers or industry professionals with some experience in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) who wish to learn to use OpenFOAM.

OpenFOAM is the most widely used open-source CFD package is widely used in academia and industry worldwide, but has a steep learning-curve compared with commercial CFD offerings, and suffers from a lack of documentation.

To those who have developed some proficiency in its use, however, it has much to offer, namely good parallel scaling, open data formats, ease of customisation and solver development and extension and a freedom from commercial licensing.

The course therefore attempts to bridge the gap between the over-simplified tutorial cases provided in the OpenFOAM user guide and simulation problems more representative of those found in engineering practise. Methods of computational mesh generation, tips and tricks for simulation setup, choice of solver, runtime tuning and postprocessing techniques will be presented through hands-on exercises. The course will focus on the use of pre-developed OpenFOAM solvers and utilities rather than writing new code. A brief introduction to using OpenFOAM on an HPC system will also be provided.

Attendees will be expected to bring their own laptop, preferrably with OpenFOAM already installed (either through a native linux installation or some sort of virtual environment). They will need a working knowledge of the linux command line interface, and preferrably to have worked through the incompressible flow dam-break tutorial case provided with OpenFOAM and described in the user-guide.

Monday, 23 September

09:00 → 10:30 LECTURE 1: Introduction to OpenFOAM

10:30 → 11:00 Tea Break

11:00 → 12:30 LECTURE2: Basic Linux Command-Line Usage

12:30 → 14:00 Lunch Break

14:00 → 15:30 LECTURE 3: Preprocessing and Meshing with OpenFOAM

15:30 → 16:00 Tea Break

16:00 → 17:00 LECTURE 4: Practical

Tuesday, 24 September

09:00 → 10:30 LECTURE 5: Meshing

10:30 → 11:00 Tea Break

11:00 → 12:30 LECTURE 5: Solver selection and usage

12:30 → 14:00 Lunch Break

14:00 → 15:30 LECTURE 7: Postprocessing with Paraview

15:30 → 16:00 Tea Break

16:00 → 17:00 LECTURE 8: Concluding remarks