CFD Direct

The Architects of OpenFOAM

CFD Resources and Articles

IC Engines in OpenFOAM

IC Engines in OpenFOAM

March 2024: CFD Direct is pleased to announce that OpenFOAM can simulate internal combustion (IC) engines including piston and valve motion. The capability was produced in collaboration with Wärtsilä, Finland and partner organisations, starting in October 2021. It is publicly available from The OpenFOAM Foundation in the development line of OpenFOAM (OpenFOAM-dev, packaged here), with example cases in the ICengines repository. Wärtsilä plan to release new features in the ICengines repository in August each year, following each new version release of OpenFOAM in July.

OpenFOAM v11 Training 2024

OpenFOAM v11 Training 2024

In Spring/Summer 2024, CFD Direct is running its OpenFOAM Training courses — Essential CFD, Applied CFD and Programming CFD — fully updated with the latest features of the new version 11 release of OpenFOAM. The training uses new features in OpenFOAM v11 for more productive and effective CFD. All courses are delivered as live virtual training. Essential and Applied CFD courses are available: 29 Jan-2 Feb, 4-8 Mar, 8-12 Apr, 13-17 May. Programming CFD is available 12-14 Feb, 18-20 Mar, 3-5 Jun, 24-26 Jun.

CFDDFC® v11 Released

CFDDFC® v11 Released

CFD Direct announces the release of version 11 of CFD Direct From the Cloud™ (CFDDFC®), available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace as the standard CFDDFC product, Web CFDDFC and CFDDFC (Arm). Standard CFDDFC v11 includes OpenFOAM v11, ParaView v5.10, OpenMPI v4.1.5 and FreeCAD v0.20, running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Web CFDDFC has the same software running on Ubuntu 22.04. CFDDFC (Arm) is server-only including OpenFOAM v11 and OpenMPI v4.1.5, running on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. CFDDFC and Web CFDDFC run on single instances with up to 96 cores on Intel C7i instances (c7i.48xlarge) or C6a AMD instances (c6a.48xlarge) or in clusters with of instances up to 1000 cores or more.

Productive CFD in OpenFOAM 11

Productive CFD in OpenFOAM 11

In 2016 we published a guide for Productive CFD with OpenFOAM with tools we first released in OpenFOAM v4. The tools included the post-processing CLI and template cases, and applications such as foamDictionary. We extended the article following the release of new tools such as TAB completion in OpenFOAM v5 and again later with the introduction of new tools in subsequent versions of OpenFOAM. This article describe more significant new tools introduced in OpenFOAM version 11, notably foamToC and foamPostProcess, to provide compatibility with its modular solvers, while maintaining backward-compatibility with application solvers.

Learn Effective CFD

Learn Effective CFD | CFD Direct

OpenFOAM provides leading CFD software to thousands of people within academia and industry for free. However, CFD is inherently complex and competency in CFD requires more than simply “learning the software package”. Our 3 OpenFOAM Training courses build CFD competency through a process of solution design with course prices equivalent to 1-2 weeks of payroll cost of a CFD engineer or 2% of a single core, commercial CFD licence. Our schedule during Covid-19 travel restrictions includes scheduled live virtual training courses at times to fit with Europe and Americas time zones.

Get the Best OpenFOAM Training

Get the Best OpenFOAM Training

Anyone investing in OpenFOAM Training must want training that delivers the best return on their investment. It can be difficult to choose the best OpenFOAM training from the variety of disparate training offerings in a market that is particularly open due to the open source nature of the software. Questions should be asked of potential training providers to establish their credibility and experience in OpenFOAM and in CFD training. In this article we present 10 questions that might usefully be asked and present CFD Direct’s answers to the questions.