are written by C or C++, rather than fortran?

I believe EFD.Lab is. But, I'm curious, why do you ask?

When I attended a Fluent users' meeting, perhaps 8 years ago, the developers announced (to groans from the users, who were mostly Fortran-trained engineers) that they were going to write the next major release in C++.

Hi,

I know that FOAM of Nabla (http://www.nabla.co.uk) is commercial and written in C++,although the academic license is free, which is something your do not want?

there is also one free I know about, called mouse http://fire8.vug.uni-duisburg.de/MOUSE/

why do you need commercial?

matej

Hi,

Fluent6.1 is fully written in C, as pointed out Mouse is in C++, and their is another free product called UG (see Resources section, Books (Computational Gas Dynamics (Laney)/Software), you can get information about both.

Apurva

Yup. It's called FOAM (Field Operation and Manipulation). It does more than just CFD, although that's where it has started from: people are doing fluids - incompressible, compressible, turbulence (RANS + LES, combustion, spray, free surface, multiphase and more), solids (linear and non-linear stress analysis, contact problems, crack propagation, solid-fluid interaction etc.), electromagnetics, and more.

The idea of the code (there's many ways of doing CFD in C++) is to represent the equations in the code as closely as possible to their mathematical form, so a piece of top-level would look like this and you guess what it does (fvm = finite volume method):

fvVectorMatrix UEqn

(

fvm::ddt(U)

+ fvm::div(phi, U)

- fvm::laplacian(nu, U)

);

solve(UEqn == -fvc::grad(p));

Also, the code is set up to deal with all kinds of mesh complexity you've got in other commercial packages: unstructured meshes of arbitrary polyhedra, moving meshes (automatic mesh motion!), layer addition/removal (for the next release), sliding meshes etc. It runs massively parallel and it's got the same efficiency as STAR or Fluent.

With FOAM you also get pre and post-processing. The pre-processor is written using Java-Corba-C++ setup and it basically edits the humanly-readable dictionaries that control the code. The "standard" post-processor is OpenDX (open source) with a FOAM module configured for use; there are also interfaces to Ensight and Fieldview for people who have them.

The package is commercial and currently licenced free of charge for academic use. It runs on Linux/Unix and it's actually used by a number of universities and some commercial companies at the moment.