CFD Direct

The Architects of OpenFOAM

CFD Resources and Articles

CFD Direct: 10 years (2015-2025)

CFD Direct: 10 years (2015-2025)

In March 2025, CFD Direct celebrated its 10th anniversary.  CFD Direct was founded by Henry Weller (creator of FOAM), Chris Greenshields (OpenFOAM co-founded) and Jenya Collings in March 2015.  It maintains, develops and manages OpenFOAM, released via The OpenFOAM Foundation. Over the past 10 years it has improved the quality, usability, robustness and consistency of OpenFOAM, bringing evident benefit to all its users.  CFD Direct also provides services to users of OpenFOAM, including development, CFD support and consultancy, OpenFOAM training and cloud computing (CFDDFC®).

MULES in OpenFOAM in 2025

MULES in OpenFOAM in 2025

In February 2025, there were significant improvements to MULES in the development line of OpenFOAM which make it extremely robust, easier to use, and quicker to run. The changes include: improvements to the iterative MULES algorithm to guarantee boundedness of solutions; a new control structure for the MULES parameters; an optional tolerance for limiter convergence for semi-implicit MULES; better control for sub-cycling the α-equation based on setting a function of the α-Courant number.

Field-Based Lagrangian

Field-Based Lagrangian

This article is a user guide to the new field-based Lagrangian functionality in OpenFOAM. This is a new implementation of Lagrangian functionality where data is stored as fields rather than in the objects representing particles or parcels (particle-based Lagrangian). It will ultimately replace the original particle-based Lagrangian and is 65% complete and available in OpenFOAM-dev. Field-based Lagrangian has the advantages of: better extensibility, since fields can be simply added; greater efficiency of fewer function calls using field algebra; greater code reuse due to consistency with the rest of OpenFOAM.

Productive CFD: OpenFOAM Training Course

Productive CFD: OpenFOAM Training Course

CFD Direct is delighted to announce Productive CFD, their new CFD Training course with OpenFOAM.  The course was created by Chris Greenshields and Aidan Wimshurst drawing on the experience of Chris’s 16 years of OpenFOAM Training and Aidan’s Fluid Mechanics 101 channel.  The course focuses on performing high quality CFD with OpenFOAM, rather than merely operating the CFD software.  It explains how to get better, relevant results in fewer attempts, identifying and fixing issues quickly and with confidence. The course is split into 2 parts, each of 2 days duration, and is delivered in person with 2025 dates of 15-18 September 2025, Cologne, Germany and 20-23 October 2025, Chicago, USA.

OpenFOAM v12 Training 2025

OpenFOAM v12 Training 2025

In Winter/Spring 2025, CFD Direct is running its OpenFOAM Training courses — Productive CFD, Essential CFD, Applied CFD and Programming CFD — fully updated with the latest features of the new version 12 release of OpenFOAM. The training uses new features in OpenFOAM v12 for more productive and effective CFD, including: foamFind, unit conversion, coded and packaged function objects, meshing multiple regions and coupling with boundary conditions. Productive of CFD is available 17-20 Mar. Essential and Applied CFD courses are available: 10-14 Feb, 3-7 Mar. Programming CFD is available 24-26 Feb, 24-26 Mar.

CFDDFC® v12 Released

CFDDFC® v12 Released

CFD Direct announces the release of version 12 of CFD Direct From the Cloud™ (CFDDFC®), available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace as the standard CFDDFC product, Web CFDDFC and CFDDFC (Arm). CFDDFC v12 includes OpenFOAM v12, ParaView v5.10, OpenMPI v4.1.7 and FreeCAD v0.21, running on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Standard CFDDFC can be accessed using the X2Go remote desktop client whereas Web CFDDFC and CFDDFC (Arm) are accessible using a remote desktop in a browser. A single instance can run CFDDFC and Web CFDDFC on up to 96 cores and CFDDFC (Arm) on up to 192. Instances can be clustered to run with 1000 cores or more.