[Karpfen]

Hello all,

i want to postprocess simulation data computed with OpenFOAM in ANSYS FD Post.
Can someone help me with this?

What i found/tried (mostly from OpenFoam to CFX):

1.) One can export the data to Fluent (using foamMeshToFluent and foamDataToFluen). The resulting .msh and .dat files should be readable by Fluent and in Fluent should be exportable to a file format readable by CFD Post.
I failed in trying to read the two files directly into CFD Post.
Does someone know a workaround? S
imply appending one file to the other didn't work.

2.) There is the option of foamDataToCgns and the cgns file format should be readable by CFD Post.
I am pretty new to Linux and find the information concerning the Installation process of the libraries needed for this to be sparse.
I was unable to install the libraries from the download from https://cgns.github.io/download.html with help from ist included install.txt.
Because of my lack of understanding, this route does not seem easy to me.
But if someone has encouraging information, i might try further.

Background:
Our company uses ANSYS CFX. But we want to try OpenFOAM for some simulations which are relatively easy to pre-process. My superior and co-workers are very reluctant to additionally become acquainted with paraView.

Information, tips and hints regarding the use of CFD Post together with OpenFoam would be very much appreciated.

Thank you and kind regards,
Karsten Hagemann

[AndreasPe]

Hello Karsten,

i am also investigating on this topic and have some further information as well as some questions:

- Which OpenFOAM-Version do you intend to use?
- Do you want to post-process transient solutions, too?

If you intent to post-process transient solutions, the CGNS-Conversion seems not usable as CFD-Post does not support post-processing of transient CGNS data (At least as I understand). Maybe the lack of CFD-Post to support transient CGNS-Solutions could be avoided by creating a file that makes CFD-Post think it is post-processing some other transient data than CGNS but I did not find any solution for this till now.

As for the compilation of the CGNS coverter, I managed to get it running with Foam-Extend-4.0 using the converter for OpenFoam-1.6 from this site: https://openfoamwiki.net/index.php/S...GNS_Converters
(as I remember Foam-Extend is a fork of OpenFOAM-1.6 and so I thought this version might be the easyest to get running)
I had to make different changes to the code though (mostly concerning the Make/Options of FoamToCGNS) which i don't quite remember right now, but i know that it should work at least with conversion of the pressure and velocity fields. The CGNS Data can then be read with CFD-Post for one timestep at a time.

The Fluent-Workaround seems quite promising as CFD-Post supports transient postprocessing of Fluent solutions (see Animation of Fluent transient data post 3 and Animation of Fluent transient data post 8). I'll investigate further on this, too.

If there are any news on the topic, please keep me updated.

Kind regards,

Andreas

[Karpfen]

Hello Andreas,

thank you very much for your reply.

First the answers to your questions:
- We will only be computing steady state simulations in the foreseeable future.
- I only tried the current OpenFoam Version (OpenFoam 5.0). Because we only do steady state simulations, probably any other Version would suffice as well.


Our company will acquire a Fluent license in the first quarter of the next year. The plan is now to try this route then. I can then post here if it was successful.

It is really good to know though that the CGNS-converter works. I am uncertain how much time i will be able to devote to that till next year. A problem with that was that the "svn checkout"-commands from your suggested source Website (https://openfoamwiki.net/index.php/S...GNS_Converters ) didn't work. I suppose it had something to do with our Network and Website permissions or somesuch. I will have to talk with our IT when i'm trying that again.


Thanks again for your very helpful information and kind regards,
Karsten

[Karpfen]

Hello,

a small update:

The foamDataToFluent- and the foamMeshToFluent-converters still work.

One has to use a Fluent-project-schematic for that.
There you open the solution-cell of the schematic where you can import the mesh and data converted from OpenFoam and save it as a .cas-file.
This cas-file can then be read by CFD-Post.

Greetings,
Karsten