In Spring/Summer 2021, 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 8 release of OpenFOAM. The training uses new features in OpenFOAM v8 for more productive and effective CFD. All courses are delivered as live virtual training due to Covid-19 travel restrictions in 2021. Essential and Applied CFD courses are available: 1-5 Feb, 15-19 Mar, 26-30 Apr. Programming CFD is available 26-28 Jan, 23-25 Feb, 23-25 Mar, 18-20 May.
Redesigning OpenFOAM for the Future

In 2020, CFD Direct were tasked to develop multicomponent diffusion modelling in OpenFOAM with funding from the Process Engineering Consortium. The Consortium need models, e.g. Maxwell-Stefan, that represent complex diffusion of species in fluid mixtures, affecting both specie concentration and energy. As part of the work, we created a new ThermophysicalTransportModels library with a new interfaces for: fluxes of heat, q() and divq(); and fluxes of mass, j() and divj(). As a consequence, heat transfer became consistent across applications, boundary conditions and data processing. This critical code redesign is typical of our strategy for sustainable development of OpenFOAM, supported by dedicated maintenance funding from OpenFOAM supporters.
CFDDFC® v8 for Azure

CFD Direct is pleased to announce the release of version 8 of CFD Direct From the Cloud™ (CFDDFC®) for Microsoft Azure. Available from the Azure Marketplace, CFDDFC v8 includes OpenFOAM v8, ParaView v5.6.0, OpenMPI v2.1.1 and FreeCAD v0.18.3, running on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Users can launch pay-as-you-go VMs from the image in minutes and connect via remote desktop or terminal login using SSH. Azure offers a wide range of VM types including the compute-optimised F-series with up to 36 physical cores (F72sv2) and the high performance computing H-series.
CFDDFC (Arm) for AWS C6g

CFD Direct has launched CFDDFC® (Arm), a marketplace product on Amazon Web Services (AWS) for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with OpenFOAM. CFDDFC (Arm) is a variant of CFD Direct From the Cloud™ for Amazon EC2 instances running Arm-based Graviton2 processors, in particular the C6g instances for compute-intensive workloads. CFDDFC (Arm) operates in server-mode without graphical applications and includes OpenFOAM 7 and OpenMPI 4.0.3 running on Ubuntu Server for Arm 20.04 LTS. For batch CFD jobs with guaranteed access on-demand, users can save 35% on their EC2 costs with C6g instances.
CFDDFC® v8 Released

CFD Direct is pleased to announce the release of version 8 of CFD Direct From the Cloud™ (CFDDFC®), available on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace as the standard CFDDFC product and CFDDFC (Arm). Standard CFDDFC v8 includes OpenFOAM v8, ParaView v5.6.0, OpenMPI v3.1.4 and FreeCAD v0.18.3, running on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. CFDDFC (Arm) is server-only including OpenFOAM v8 and OpenMPI v4.0.3, running on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. CFDDFC runs on single instances with up to 48 C5 Intel cores (c5.24xlarge) or 64 C6 Arm-based cores (c6g.16xlarge) and in clusters with with good parallel scaling on clusters of instances up to 1000 cores.
Interface Capturing in OpenFOAM

In July 2020, CFD Direct released a framework for surface interpolation in interface capturing for multiphase flows in OpenFOAM. All interpolation schemes, used for flux calculation in advection, operate with the MULES-based solvers, e.g. interFoam. The framework is easy to use, extensible, and robust due to bounded, conservative numerics. The new framework comes with a new family of interpolation schemes based on piecewise-linear interface calculation (PLIC). The PLIC schemes provide a promising alternative to standard interface compression, performing better for meshes with regions of cell refinement. All schemes are conservative, bounded and robust and can run efficiently with large time steps.