Definitely OpenFOAM. It competes with commercial software that costs thousands of dollars.
I'm curious what you use it for? I was looking at it for possibly doing some automotive aero analysis on a track car. I want to design a custom flat bottom / diffuser. Currently my biggest problem is getting a quality scan to work off of. (I'm fairly technical, but completely new to CFD simulation)
I use it for erosion simulations in piping systems. I work in kind of a niche field, and there really aren't any commercial tools that do what I need. With a fair bit of effort, OpenFOAM can be customized to do pretty much anything. It should be able to do a steady flow simulation over a vehicle right out of the box though. The hard part will be generating a mesh. I'd recommend doing that with specialized meshing software.
Very cool. I didn't know OpenFOAM was that powerful / customizable. Glad to hear flow simulations are supported out of the box, because I wouldn't be able to evaluate it's accuracy to tweak it myself.
I've got a few ideas for capturing my own mesh using some VR tracking hardware and an Azure Kinect, both of which I've worked extensively with in the past. I've still got to look in to some software for converting from point cloud to mesh and cleaning up the model though. I think it should be possible, and free since I've already got the hardware. Professional scanners are all thousands of dollars, so I'm trying to avoid that.
Definitely OpenFOAM. It competes with commercial software that costs thousands of dollars.
I'm curious what you use it for? I was looking at it for possibly doing some automotive aero analysis on a track car. I want to design a custom flat bottom / diffuser. Currently my biggest problem is getting a quality scan to work off of. (I'm fairly technical, but completely new to CFD simulation)
I use it for erosion simulations in piping systems. I work in kind of a niche field, and there really aren't any commercial tools that do what I need. With a fair bit of effort, OpenFOAM can be customized to do pretty much anything. It should be able to do a steady flow simulation over a vehicle right out of the box though. The hard part will be generating a mesh. I'd recommend doing that with specialized meshing software.
Very cool. I didn't know OpenFOAM was that powerful / customizable. Glad to hear flow simulations are supported out of the box, because I wouldn't be able to evaluate it's accuracy to tweak it myself.
I've got a few ideas for capturing my own mesh using some VR tracking hardware and an Azure Kinect, both of which I've worked extensively with in the past. I've still got to look in to some software for converting from point cloud to mesh and cleaning up the model though. I think it should be possible, and free since I've already got the hardware. Professional scanners are all thousands of dollars, so I'm trying to avoid that.