Complete OpenFOAM tutorial - from geometry creation to postprocessing

When I was trying to learn openfoam, I began by looking up tutorials on youtube. Most of the so-called tutorials I found simply taught users how to run a pre-loaded case, this basically amounted to typing in a meshing command followed by an execute calculation command. In this video I hope to provide users with enough information that they feel comfortable running their own custom simulation.

One step I left out was creating the initial project folder; to do this simply copy a tutorial example that closely resembles what you want to do. If I left anything else out or was too vague, leave it in the comments and I will do my best to help.

[interfluo]

Time-Stamps:
0:00 - Introduction/Overview
1:09 - Geometry: ANSYS DesignModeler
2:35 - Generate Mesh: Fluent Mesh
3:57 - Exporting Mesh File
4:27 - Navigate to project folder
5:05 - convert mesh to OpenFOAM format
5:36 - Check and modify boundary conditions
6:46 - Calculation Control
7:23 - Check mesh in ParaView
8:36 - run calculation
8:56 - save results
9:20 - post process in ParaView
10:40 - animation/closing remarks

[muhammadhasnain]

probably the best tutorial for learning openfoam, being a beginner. other tutorials runs a pre-loaded case which is hard to learn and understand.

[nishadhooli]

One the Best tutorial among all the videos on openfoam, appreciated the work!

[grossherzog]

Fantastic video! Short and simple and easy to understand. Of course, before we watch the video, we must have some basics of OpenFOAM (at least tried Lid Caity driven case) and Ansys-FLUENT. Keep up the good effort. Hope you have create more new videos.

[nayilmalik]

informative, clear and lucid, need some more videos on brain aneurysms ANYSY and openFOAM, shall keep waiting. Thanks

[Tommybotham]

This is not a complete tutorial... You have edited some of the files in system and you have not shown what you have done. blockMeshDict for example has "upperWall", "lowerWall" and "frontAndBack", whereas our geometry has just wall. I have no idea what values to put in the matrices for wall. Running this setup throws errors. So this is another frustrating, incomplete OpenFOAM tutorial....

I get this error:

"--> FOAM Warning :
From void const
in file at line 100
Removed group 'wall' which clashes with patch 2 of the same name.
--> FOAM Warning :
From Foam::labelHashSet Foam::UList<Foam::wordRe>&, bool, bool) const
in file at line 915
Cannot find any patch or group names matching lowerWall
--> FOAM Warning :
From Foam::labelHashSet Foam::UList<Foam::wordRe>&, bool, bool) const
in file at line 921
Cannot find any patch names matching lowerWall
Sampled surface:
nearWall -> vtk
sampledPatchInternalField: nearWall : patches:1(lowerWall)"


EDIT: seems to run now. The only change I made was making sure that deltaT = 0.0001. However, my point stands with the blockMeshDict file. Why does it still run even though upper/lower/front and back are mentioned there? And if I want to only mention "wall", how do I find the values to put in the matrix?

[miiortbiiort]

Oh wow! I just started learning OpenFOAM two weeks ago and I'm in the exact position you described. Its really difficult to find actually helpful (beginner focussed) content out there :(. Thanks for making this! :) I did have a question if you have the time. I'm trying to simulate airflow around an air rifle pellet (basically a bullet) as if in a wind tunnel. How do I best go about setting up the original case folder? I could indeed just copy a folder like the motorBike tutorial, but every file there already seems customized to fit the motorbike.obj model. Is there a more basic way to create a case folder that works for general models or does that require extensive knowledge beyond a beginners capacity?

[sharemarketkoninja]

Thousand thanks to you man. Keep up the charity work.

[onurerdincler]

This got me excited about going back to openfoam again and experiment after hopelessly struggling with that 90 degree elbow flow tutorial during my uni years

[Rubafix]

Thanks a lot. I was at a loss when simscale severely limited the community offer to only 10 simulations. OpenFOAM is not as intuitive but seems quite powerful.

[pabloesauljaramillo]

This tutorial is absolutely great, it helped me a lot with a school porject

[yatbuunchoi]

Good Tutorial. A few comments. You missed where to set the model in the constant folder. I know it's LES, but say someone wants to go with a RAS KOmegaSST model instead. Maybe it's out of the scope of the tutorial. Also, it would be helpful to go over the boundary conditions. For instance, why is there an inletOutlet condition on the outlet of U and what is a turbulent inlet condition. A lot of tutorials miss explaining what boundary conditions are and OpenFOAM is very sensitive to them. The angle you're taking in your tutorials is great and needed, thank you and keep it up.

[ZitaoJiang]

Thank you a lot! I am learning to apply LES in building ventilation simulation in bluecfd and I find this video very helpful and straightforward! I have a very simple question: why do we use OpenFoam to do simulation if we have Ansys Fluent? What's the advantage of OpenFoam compared to Ansys Fluent?

[asifraj]

amazing tutorial. definitely, it helps me in my project work. Hope you make more video like this, Thank you.

[significantcell]

Hi. Thank you for your tutorial. Unfortunately m, I was disappointedat. I mean the content of the video and its description are not identical: No focus on how to setup the case, no focus on the turbulence model, why to choose that model, how to set its coefficients, how to set the boundary/initial conditions in 0 folder. The main focus was only on mesh generation which is relatively easy compared to case preparation and proper setup itself.

[manuelffonseca]

Great video! A question Why is the value of k on internal field cero? Is this value for the definition of turbulentinlet on the inlet? Best regards.

[Darth]

As far as my understanding goes, the mesh you created in Ansys was a custom one. How did you get the 0, constant, and system files for the simulation to run? The rest of the video is very informative, so thanks.

[ballalpatil]

Thank you so much for this. I really needed something like this!

[lorenleskovar]

Great video! Could you do a tutorial on open channel flow (like square or trapezoidal crossection of the channel)

[Stefano-chqx]

thanks for the tutorial, can you tell me which folders "0, constants, system" you used?