OpenFOAM is regularly used to simulate complex fluid flow systems in the most challenging industries and areas of scientific research. It has a comprehensive set of functionality that has been developed and refined over the past 30 years to optimise the accuracy, efficiency and reliability of the code. Many state-of-the-art fluid flow simulations, such as internal combustion engines with piston and valve motion, are only possible with the advanced features that OpenFOAM provides. The following lists contain some, but not all, of the available features and functionality in OpenFOAM.
Fluid Dynamics/Physical Modelling
- Reynolds-Averaged Simulation (RAS)
- Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) and Detached-Eddy Simulation (DES, DDES, etc)
- Compressible flow and shocks
- Conjugate heat transfer
- Multiphase flow
- Films
- Reaction kinetics / chemistry
- Combustion
- Population balance
- Lagrangian particle tracking
- Dynamic meshes (rotating, translating, deforming)
- Non-conformal mesh coupling (NCC)
- Mesh-to-mesh mapping
- Porous media
- Rheology
- Scalar transport
- User-defined sources
Numerical Solution
- Linear system solvers
- ODE system solvers
- Multi-region solver
- Field constraints
Geometry and Meshing
- Geometry transformation
- Mesh generation (blockMesh and snappyHexMesh)
- Mesh format conversion
- Mesh transform, mirror and scale
- Mesh split, stitch and merge
- Topology changes
Post-processing
- Serial and parallel processing
- Averaging and statistics
- Points, lines and surfaces
- Streamlines
- Iso-surfaces
- User-defined functions
- User-defined fields
Computing and Programming
- Modular solvers
- Intuitive equation syntax
- User-defined applications, solvers and libraries
- Case configuration tools
- Template cases