The Back Story

OpenFOAM® continues to be the leading Open Source CFD code for the last decade. When compared to the commercial programs, the training materials and documentation are often said to be limited. That statement is not entirely true anymore because in the last couple of years many resources in the form of videos and training materials are available online. The official doxygen code documentation is, of course, user friendly. However, many students find OpenFOAM® learning curve to be steep.

In my opinion, the problem is not the lack of resources but because the students are not used to the Linux environment and often this is the first time they are working with a scientific code. I had the opportunity to attend a great OpenFOAM practical course offered at TUM. Soon after the course, me and a friend of mine, decided to help the Open Source community by making some video tutorials, that was in 2011. In tutorial #1 we introuduce Linux and OpenFOAM and in the following tutorials we explain the structure of an OpenFOAM® case and creating mesh with blockMesh utility. There have been many structural changes in the recent versions of OpenFOAM, nevertheless many still find the old tutorials to be of some use.

OpenFOAM® Tutorials on YouTube

Tutorial #1: Intro, Installation & First Simulation
Tutorial #2: Boundary conditions & Solution schemes
Tutorial #3: blockMeshDict
Tutorial #4: Laminar Vortex Shedding

Comflics Blog

Exploring OpenFOAM®

The case files needed for the tutorials are available on GitHub. We also started to write some notes for each tutorial, however this still remains incomplete.

Laminar Vortex Shedding and eBook

Disclaimer

This offering is not approved or endorsed by OpenCFD Limited, producer and distributor of the OpenFOAM software via www.openfoam.com, and owner of the OPENFOAM® and OpenCFD® trade marks.