Which are the aspects you consider most difficult to learn of OpenFOAM to new users?

albertokarkour · October 16, 2016, 11:38

Hello! I'm a Mechanical Engineering student from Venezuela, me and a friend are working on a OpenFOAM thesis to get the degree.

Since this Forum has a lot of experts in several engineering areas; we would like to know if you could tell us Which are the aspects you consider most difficult to learn of OpenFOAM to new users?

We would be very thankful if you could share your opinion with us!

The propuse of our work is to develop a learning structure project based to learn OpenFOAM basics to students worldwide and more specifically in Venezuela, because in this country is really hard to get the comercial software packages due to an economical crisis.

It would be very helpful if you could leave your full name and institution you work for to give you credit for your opinion in our work!

Thanks in advance!

Alberto Karkour
Mechanical engineering student from La Universidad Del Zulia. Maracaibo, Venezuela
Albertokarkour@gmail.com
+58 424 725 7442

nsf · October 16, 2016, 17:16

Hi Alberto,

Sounds like a useful project! I wish you both good luck.

Personally I think what's most difficult varies quite a lot. It depends on the students background and most definitely on her or his intent. Is it to develop a new solver or to calculate something based on existing solvers?

Why not establish a set of skills which are required? Then base a set of lessons based on those skills.

Here are some skills that comes to mind, they are not complete and might not be needed by everyone.

Linux shell,
Fluid mechanics and math,
Numerics,
parallel computing,
turbulence modeling and models
and knowing how to browse the code.

If you go be the most common questions in this forum I think proper set up of boundary conditions comes quite high. Also interpreting error messages might be common.

Best regards
Nicolas

GerhardHolzinger · October 17, 2016, 04:37

I strongy support the statements of Nicolas.
All open source software grants you the freedom to learn, modify and re-distribute (my apologies for this over-simplification).
In order to profit from the openess of OpenFOAM a certain set of skills is required.

A basic understanding of Linux (Unix) would be very helpful. OpenFOAM shares some design decisions of the Unix world, e.g. managing and controlling the software based on human-readable text files; or, develop one application for one task, and use them in conjunction to do big jobs. Thus, a basic understanding of the Unix/Linux world makes OpenFOAM appear less weird (from the perspective of a life-long windows user). So students/users won't expect to find the OpenFOAM GUI with menus and dialogues.

Also a basic understanding of C++ is very (can't stress that enough) helpful. I spend a fair share of the my trouble-shooting time browsing the source code in order to find out what a specific application is expecting or doing. Also, your freedom to study OpenFOAM's inner soul is kind of worthless to you, if you can't read C++.

Finally, OpenFOAM does not try to be everyone's friend. There is software for computer aided design (CAD), which provide models for the finite element method (FEM), with all the magic happening in the background in black boxes hidden from the user. OpenFOAM does not follow this approach. So, users should have knowledge of the finite volume method (FVM) to make sense of all the options provided by OpenFOAM.

Zbynek · October 17, 2016, 12:23

First of all, I second Nicolas and Gerhard so I will not repeat what they already said.

OpenFOAM requires deeper knowledge about all the complexity that CFD intrinsically contains. That is some knowledge of engineering, numerics and programming. If you take a commercial software, such as Fluent, you need to have engineering thinking to solve the projects you are supposed to work on. The programming that is required from you is limited to the user-defined functions, which is not very hard. Numerics is taken care of by the solver, you only need to know which scheme is suitable in which situations etc. You have a nice GUI, good documentation which answers most questions that ever pop up in your head so you can really focus on the engineering work.

OpenFOAM makes the life still a lot easier than if you had to write a CFD program from scratch, of course. But be prepared that you will spend much more time looking for mathematical and programming questions. Which gives you less time to work as an engineer. However, this also forces you to understand CFD as a whole better. There is no GUI so it is not very comfortable to work with it (there are companies that build GUIs for OF but it does not come for free, of course). Documentation is very limited and you need to look for answers elsewhere - that's why OF space on this forum is more busy than the Fluent space. Also, OF has less capabilities than the commercial software but I believe that there are OF solvers for most practical situations. Thanks to the open nature of OF, you can write whatever solver or utility you can imagine. However, it requires you to be advanced in mathematics and programming.

Ultimately, it depends whether you want to be a user of OF or whether you want to develop it. I would say that in the first case you need to have especially good engineering skills and the requirements on the other two components, numerics and programming, are lower. If you are planning to be a developer, the situation is reversed. I know that ideally one should be Superman and know everything perfectly, but there are not many people that would be strong in all three areas. So as it was said earlier, to a student of engineering the difficult aspects of OF will be different than to a student of mathematics.

I wish you good luck with your project.

albertokarkour · October 17, 2016, 20:08

Hey! First of all, thanks for your opinion and your recommendations, all your observations are really useful to us.

Quote:

Originally Posted by nsf

Hi Alberto,

Sounds like a useful project! I wish you both good luck.

Personally I think what's most difficult varies quite a lot. It depends on the students background and most definitely on her or his intent. Is it to develop a new solver or to calculate something based on existing solvers?

Hi Nicolas, Thanks for your help and good wishes!.

The purpose of the course is to learn the basics of OpenFOAM to Engineering students to use it as a powerful tool to perform CFD simulations so we will start teaching how to calculate something based on existing solvers.

Quote:

Originally Posted by nsf

Why not establish a set of skills which are required? Then base a set of lessons based on those skills.
Here are some skills that comes to mind, they are not complete and might not be needed by everyone.

Linux shell,
Fluid mechanics and math,
Numerics,
parallel computing,
turbulence modeling and models
and knowing how to browse the code.

Thanks for that also we could establish a set of skills required that the average engineering student should know, we think that someone with this skills could learn how to use OpenFOAM and be able to calculate and run simulations based on existing solvers.

Basic programming
Basic computing
Fluid mechanics and heat transfer
Numerics

We are using Windows so the new users feel more confortable.

Quote:

Originally Posted by nsf

If you go be the most common questions in this forum I think proper set up of boundary conditions comes quite high. Also interpreting error messages might be common.

Best regards
Nicolas

This would be like common difficulties that most users have.

Set up of boundary conditions
Interpreting error messages of OpenFOAM
Linux
Learning Finite Volume Method
Absence of a GUI
How to browse through OpenFOAM and its pre and post processing associates tools

The purpose of this list is that we can focus on this common difficulties users tend to experience in their contact with the software so we can put special attention when it comes on teaching it.

We also establish a set of skills a OpenFOAM user should have to be able to use and edit the solvers in order to solve engineering problems.

Linux basic commands
Configure a case using existing libraries
OpenFOAM structure familiarization
Edit data files
Use of the basic CFD models to solve engineering problems
Identify proper boundary conditions in a case
Basic FVM
Basic turbulence models
Results interpretation of a CFD code

Quote:

Originally Posted by GerhardHolzinger

I strongy support the statements of Nicolas.
All open source software grants you the freedom to learn, modify and re-distribute (my apologies for this over-simplification).
In order to profit from the openess of OpenFOAM a certain set of skills is required.

A basic understanding of Linux (Unix) would be very helpful. OpenFOAM shares some design decisions of the Unix world, e.g. managing and controlling the software based on human-readable text files; or, develop one application for one task, and use them in conjunction to do big jobs. Thus, a basic understanding of the Unix/Linux world makes OpenFOAM appear less weird (from the perspective of a life-long windows user). So students/users won't expect to find the OpenFOAM GUI with menus and dialogues.

Hi Gerhard, thanks for your help! Yes, in fact that's what we try to make more friendly the learning process for students. Those kind of understanding would be really good and we enlisted them as skills more focus on the development area

Linux skills
Object oriented programming
C++
Manage and control software based on human-readable text
Develop an application for one specific task
Do big jobs linking taks
Advance FVM
Advance turbulence modeling
Basic ecuations for CFD models

Quote:

Originally Posted by GerhardHolzinger

Also a basic understanding of C++ is very (can't stress that enough) helpful. I spend a fair share of the my trouble-shooting time browsing the source code in order to find out what a specific application is expecting or doing. Also, your freedom to study OpenFOAM's inner soul is kind of worthless to you, if you can't read C++.

Thanks, we should consider C++ understanding as an must for a developer.

Quote:

Originally Posted by GerhardHolzinger

Finally, OpenFOAM does not try to be everyone's friend. There is software for computer aided design (CAD), which provide models for the finite element method (FEM), with all the magic happening in the background in black boxes hidden from the user. OpenFOAM does not follow this approach. So, users should have knowledge of the finite volume method (FVM) to make sense of all the options provided by OpenFOAM.

That is true, most people could be hard to familiarize with the OpenFOAM because of this but once you can manage to motivate users they will learn better how to use the program and CFD code itself.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zbynek

First of all, I second Nicolas and Gerhard so I will not repeat what they already said.

OpenFOAM requires deeper knowledge about all the complexity that CFD intrinsically contains. That is some knowledge of engineering, numerics and programming. If you take a commercial software, such as Fluent, you need to have engineering thinking to solve the projects you are supposed to work on. The programming that is required from you is limited to the user-defined functions, which is not very hard. Numerics is taken care of by the solver, you only need to know which scheme is suitable in which situations etc. You have a nice GUI, good documentation which answers most questions that ever pop up in your head so you can really focus on the engineering work.

OpenFOAM makes the life still a lot easier than if you had to write a CFD program from scratch, of course. But be prepared that you will spend much more time looking for mathematical and programming questions. Which gives you less time to work as an engineer. However, this also forces you to understand CFD as a whole better. There is no GUI so it is not very comfortable to work with it (there are companies that build GUIs for OF but it does not come for free, of course). Documentation is very limited and you need to look for answers elsewhere - that's why OF space on this forum is more busy than the Fluent space. Also, OF has less capabilities than the commercial software but I believe that there are OF solvers for most practical situations. Thanks to the open nature of OF, you can write whatever solver or utility you can imagine. However, it requires you to be advanced in mathematics and programming.

Ultimately, it depends whether you want to be a user of OF or whether you want to develop it. I would say that in the first case you need to have especially good engineering skills and the requirements on the other two components, numerics and programming, are lower. If you are planning to be a developer, the situation is reversed. I know that ideally one should be Superman and know everything perfectly, but there are not many people that would be strong in all three areas. So as it was said earlier, to a student of engineering the difficult aspects of OF will be different than to a student of mathematics.

I wish you good luck with your project.

Thanks for your help Zbynek, you are absolutely right, we have to difference between Users and Developers even though sometimes we need to combine the skills of both.

Really thanks for your opinions and help! If you think in other difficulty, skills required or any sugestion we will appreciate it!

Traction · October 18, 2016, 03:50

I highly appreciate your courage for this project. It is important to teach new users about the power and the construct of OpenFOAM. I just wanted to mention that there is a recent project trying to make the OpenFOAM introduction more appropriate and open for new users. I think your thoughts and ideas would be a good extension to this.
The project is located at https://wiki.openfoam.com/Tutorials where you can also find contributors and the related contact details.

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October 16, 2016, 11:38	Which are the aspects you consider most difficult to learn of OpenFOAM to new users?	#1
albertokarkour New Member Alberto Karkour Join Date: Jul 2016 Location: Maracaibo, Venezuela Posts: 6 Rep Power: 10	Hello! I'm a Mechanical Engineering student from Venezuela, me and a friend are working on a OpenFOAM thesis to get the degree. Since this Forum has a lot of experts in several engineering areas; we would like to know if you could tell us Which are the aspects you consider most difficult to learn of OpenFOAM to new users? We would be very thankful if you could share your opinion with us! The propuse of our work is to develop a learning structure project based to learn OpenFOAM basics to students worldwide and more specifically in Venezuela, because in this country is really hard to get the comercial software packages due to an economical crisis. It would be very helpful if you could leave your full name and institution you work for to give you credit for your opinion in our work! Thanks in advance! Alberto Karkour Mechanical engineering student from La Universidad Del Zulia. Maracaibo, Venezuela Albertokarkour@gmail.com +58 424 725 7442

October 16, 2016, 17:16		#2
nsf Senior Member Nicolas Edh Join Date: Mar 2010 Location: Uppsala, Sweden Posts: 123 Rep Power: 18	Hi Alberto, Sounds like a useful project! I wish you both good luck. Personally I think what's most difficult varies quite a lot. It depends on the students background and most definitely on her or his intent. Is it to develop a new solver or to calculate something based on existing solvers? Why not establish a set of skills which are required? Then base a set of lessons based on those skills. Here are some skills that comes to mind, they are not complete and might not be needed by everyone. Linux shell, Fluid mechanics and math, Numerics, parallel computing, turbulence modeling and models and knowing how to browse the code. If you go be the most common questions in this forum I think proper set up of boundary conditions comes quite high. Also interpreting error messages might be common. Best regards Nicolas

October 17, 2016, 04:37		#3
GerhardHolzinger Senior Member Gerhard Holzinger Join Date: Feb 2012 Location: Austria Posts: 342 Rep Power: 28	I strongy support the statements of Nicolas. All open source software grants you the freedom to learn, modify and re-distribute (my apologies for this over-simplification). In order to profit from the openess of OpenFOAM a certain set of skills is required. A basic understanding of Linux (Unix) would be very helpful. OpenFOAM shares some design decisions of the Unix world, e.g. managing and controlling the software based on human-readable text files; or, develop one application for one task, and use them in conjunction to do big jobs. Thus, a basic understanding of the Unix/Linux world makes OpenFOAM appear less weird (from the perspective of a life-long windows user). So students/users won't expect to find the OpenFOAM GUI with menus and dialogues. Also a basic understanding of C++ is very (can't stress that enough) helpful. I spend a fair share of the my trouble-shooting time browsing the source code in order to find out what a specific application is expecting or doing. Also, your freedom to study OpenFOAM's inner soul is kind of worthless to you, if you can't read C++. Finally, OpenFOAM does not try to be everyone's friend. There is software for computer aided design (CAD), which provide models for the finite element method (FEM), with all the magic happening in the background in black boxes hidden from the user. OpenFOAM does not follow this approach. So, users should have knowledge of the finite volume method (FVM) to make sense of all the options provided by OpenFOAM.

October 17, 2016, 12:23		#4
Zbynek Member Join Date: Jun 2016 Posts: 66 Rep Power: 11	First of all, I second Nicolas and Gerhard so I will not repeat what they already said. OpenFOAM requires deeper knowledge about all the complexity that CFD intrinsically contains. That is some knowledge of engineering, numerics and programming. If you take a commercial software, such as Fluent, you need to have engineering thinking to solve the projects you are supposed to work on. The programming that is required from you is limited to the user-defined functions, which is not very hard. Numerics is taken care of by the solver, you only need to know which scheme is suitable in which situations etc. You have a nice GUI, good documentation which answers most questions that ever pop up in your head so you can really focus on the engineering work. OpenFOAM makes the life still a lot easier than if you had to write a CFD program from scratch, of course. But be prepared that you will spend much more time looking for mathematical and programming questions. Which gives you less time to work as an engineer. However, this also forces you to understand CFD as a whole better. There is no GUI so it is not very comfortable to work with it (there are companies that build GUIs for OF but it does not come for free, of course). Documentation is very limited and you need to look for answers elsewhere - that's why OF space on this forum is more busy than the Fluent space. Also, OF has less capabilities than the commercial software but I believe that there are OF solvers for most practical situations. Thanks to the open nature of OF, you can write whatever solver or utility you can imagine. However, it requires you to be advanced in mathematics and programming. Ultimately, it depends whether you want to be a user of OF or whether you want to develop it. I would say that in the first case you need to have especially good engineering skills and the requirements on the other two components, numerics and programming, are lower. If you are planning to be a developer, the situation is reversed. I know that ideally one should be Superman and know everything perfectly, but there are not many people that would be strong in all three areas. So as it was said earlier, to a student of engineering the difficult aspects of OF will be different than to a student of mathematics. I wish you good luck with your project.

October 18, 2016, 03:50		#6
Traction Member Join Date: Mar 2014 Posts: 39 Rep Power: 12	I highly appreciate your courage for this project. It is important to teach new users about the power and the construct of OpenFOAM. I just wanted to mention that there is a recent project trying to make the OpenFOAM introduction more appropriate and open for new users. I think your thoughts and ideas would be a good extension to this. The project is located at https://wiki.openfoam.com/Tutorials where you can also find contributors and the related contact details.