CFD Direct

The Architects of OpenFOAM

OpenFOAM

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®).

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.

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.