I see that the discussion site is hosted at Chalmers University, is this the only contact with Chalmers or is there futher collaboration? Are other Universities involved and if so who?

The main reason I ask is that I was recently at Chalmers and Foam was not mentioned while I there? I visited Lars-Erik Eriksson.

Hi,
There are mainly two groups at the department of Thermo and Fluid Dynamics that use OpenFOAM:
The engine group and the multiphase group.

Lars-Erik is head of the compressible flow group and is writing his own (fortran) code.
Now I have tried getting him to use foam, but as you can imagine it is not easy to get a professor move away from his own code

And the only reason we have located the discussion forum and download area here is bandwidth.

Niklas

Hi Niklas,

what about Lars Davidson? Did you get him to use OpenFoam (if he did not use it before)?

Best Greetings!
Fabian

Hi Fabian,

hehe, nope. Equally impossible.
He also writes his own code and I understand
why you dont want to change to a 'new' code when
you have something that works.
However, this is a real shame since his group is working on
turbulence modeling/heat transfer for which FOAM is ideal.

So, as you can see there are alot of different codes in use even in our department. Some also use STAR or CFX or Fluent. However, we are a university and as such I do not believe in using commercial codes so Im hoping this will stop, but I know that industry disagree with me on this one. If we could get all groups to use the same code the synergy effects could be enormous and research would eventually push new frontiers, but as it is now alot of the work for a new PhD student is spent on starting from scratch
(OK Im being a bit overdramatic, but Im essentially right )

With the introduction of OpenFOAM one of Lars post-docs is now evaluating OpenFOAM though.

OK, maybe I answered a bit more than you wanted, but if you are willing to spend a few years learning a code with real potential I truly believe that you will make up for it in the end

there.. I've said my piece
Niklas

Hi Niklas,

I know that he has a nice working code. I actually use his multigrid-les code (maybe, you remember me; I was the german guy who does not like SuSE ;-) ).

At our department for heating and ventilation in Berlin we use Fluent and CFX, but I will try to get my Prof. Dirk Müller (maybe, you know him; he was at Chalmers for 6 months in 1998 and worked with Lars) to OpenFoam.
This will take while; I am completely new to OpenFoam and not able to tell him the main advantages (except the money) over Fluent and CFX, yet. Moreover, my time getting into OpenFoam is limited due to the multigrid-code, which will be my main tool for my Phd :-)

May I ask: Who is the post-doc of Lars using OpenFoam?

Best Greetings!
Fabian

P.S. Is there any way to write this message with a mail program?

Hi Fabian,

Yes, of course I remember. How could I forget

It's Håkan and what I've helped him with is
to implement time-dependent boundary conditions, which have been measured and are read from a file, for turbFoam.
It will hopefully be presented at the workshop in december
http://www.turbine-99.org/

... and I might also add that foam has a AMG solver which he will evaluate together with
parallell speed-up.

Niklas

Hi Niklas,

that sounds interesting!
Hopefully I am able to contribute some stuff later on, too :-)

Greetings!
Fabian

Hi OpenCFD Team

I read how many features have in OpenFoam I it let me wonder. But I need a basic think in order to use OpenFoam more heavy and include or modify something such as other models and solvers. Thus, I need technical documentation of OpenFoam such as thesis and articles which the solvers and other things are based. How can I obtain it? Have a list of these bibligraphic references and places (such as web site) where we can get or obtain it?

I wish to implement a new solver under OpenFoam.

Many Tanks ;-)

Wladimyr

There's basically two things you can do. Firstly, find yourself a foam expert/research group (they are a bit thin on the ground at the moment) and try to set up a collaborative project. This way, you could work with people who know wat they are doing, who could help you with the design/structure and guide your development such that it fits with the rest of the structure and hopefully be released into the public domain. Also, this helps you to learn about foam and its development until you are at the level to start working on your own. Some funding may be needed, but in a collaborative environment there is a lot of sources to look into: EU project, University collaboration or simply finding someone with the same interest.

The other option is to buy a block of support hours - however, don't be under the impression that foam will be easy to understand architecturally or that doing serious (re)design/development will be easy.

As for documentation, I totally agree with you it is nowhere near sufficient (a disgrace would be a better description!). However, in the new setup the documentation will only improve if people decide to contribute. Maybe some of the messages like "send me an E-mail on how to do such-and-such" should be made publicly available and have people write up and show off their work as mush as possible.

Hrv